For modeling I like Freecad and Blender. Blender is more for general modelling and sculpting, Freecad is more for cad/constraint based creation of precise 3d models. So use blender if you want to create little soldiers or elephants or other more organic stuff, and use Freecad if you want to print a replica of a plastic part or an enclosure or something like that.
There should be tons of slicers available on Linux.
Yes, it's very efficient and the core of what complession formats like .zip do.
The main difference to your idea is that computers count in binary like 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 and so on and that you don't want to assign these very low codes words directly. Say you'd have assigned 1 the most common word, then that will would be encoded very short, but you'd sort of take the one away from all the other codes, as you don't know if 11 is twice the most common word or once the 11th (3rd in decimal) common word.
Huffman essentially computes the most optimal word assignments mathematically.
The main other difference between your suggestion and most compression algorithms is that you wouldn't use a huge dictionary in real time and loading it and looking into it would be very slow. Most compression algorithms have a rather small dictionary buildin and/or they build one on the fly looking at the data that they want to compress.
It's available, but they're still US based and basically importing it, you don't have proper EU customer protection or EU warranty* for example. I wouldn't buy it just because of that.
They give 2 years of warranty for their EU customers, but not EU wide as would be required if actually selling from the EU. You also have basically no chance to sue then or otherwise demand anything if they for some reason ignore your warranty claim.
Framework has some quality problems, not everyone is a fan of the keyboard, and it's relatively expensive.
Tuxedo is quite good, but they often use stock Clevo models and customize them, so they might be cheaper and not that well designed than one by a "proper brand".
Not sure about the rest.
There's very little alternative if you want a ThinkPad style keyboard and track pad/trackpoint for the price of a used or older ThinkPad.
Interestingly, many stable diffusion models are trained on pictures of Asian people and thus often generate people that look more or less Asian if there's no specific input or tuning otherwise. It's all in the training data and tuning.
I'm not saying that support is lacking, all I'm saying is that you have to have complete trust in a company on the other side of the globe, because all the warranties and promises they give you are completely based on their good will. If they decide to stop supporting you for whatever reason, you pretty much have no leverage.
I live in Germany near the Netherlands border. Moving between countries is very common here because of different living costs and job opportunities and losing support because you move a few km west or east is not acceptable in my opinion.
However with Framework you still need to be careful in Europe. It's an US based company and if you have a defect or problem that Framework for some reason doesn't resolve, good luck trying to enforce your EU customer protection or suing them in the US.
Framework is also very strict regarding unsupported countries. If you move within the EU to a country that isn't supported by Framework, you'll have big problems with support in case you need help or parts or whatever.
It's Meta/Facebook. If people don't at least strongly suspect that they'll collect as much personal data as they possibly can, they're living behind the moon.
A human character in the Terminator films, who leads the resistance against the machines.