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Not being able to run Signal on my Android tablet feels really inconvenient. That would be no. 1 on my wish list

Kitty, but most commands are probably happening in eshell. Feels more easily scriptable to me

I use Fedora Silverblue personally (feels rock-solid and borderline impossible to mess up), but you might want to get more familiar with the basics before getting into immutable distros. I’d echo what everyone else is saying and do Linux Mint first

Just mpv for me. Simplest and most versatile option

The Pixel Tablet can run GrapheneOS, which is the best stock Android alternative IMO

The US has a pretty severe urban / rural divide in most of its states, but I don’t think it’s enough. You’d usually need a pretty clean split along territorial lines for that.

Minus the sandboxing and security improvements, apparently

You could argue that China has devolved into a totalitarian state under Xi. There’s a lot of corruption surrounding the party’s Ministry of Railways, which has led to some perverse incentives to invest (possibly way too much) in HSR and urban metro networks across all of the country. And thanks to the extremely centralized power structure, you have a lot of standardized components used to roll out those networks, making construction cheaper and faster due to economies of scale.

Tldr; China’s rail infra is pretty great, especially when so many of its cities are very rough around the edges otherwise. That said, East Asia’s democracies (Taiwan, S. Korea and Japan) also have excellent transportation networks, so who knows.

Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we’re getting close to having at least one that’s usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.