So you're paying $19 for 1GB and unlimited text/voice, plus another $15 most months for overages?

You can get 2GB with unlimited text/voice for $10/mo or $96/yr ($8/mo paid upfront) through US Mobile. You get your choice of Verizon, T-Mobile, or I believe they're adding AT&T very soon. You can add a rollable GB for $2 a pop, but I'm not 100% sure you can if you pay up front for a year of the $8/mo price.

They also have a 10GB and unlimited plans for less than you're paying, if I'm understanding your statements correctly.

We're not on the right track for much of anything.

Sure, but that's irrelevant to the point being made.

That said, I'd love to have expandable storage. Functionality out of the box aside, we need to start taking e-waste seriously, and upgradability is a major part of that along with long term software support, durability, and repairability.

Ok, but you're still dealing with the guest desktop as a windowed container. Unity mode in VMware presents individual windows to the desktop environment, not the entire desktop.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-8C477788-7700-4030-8C4A-039C02AABB74.html

Things like Distrobox will obviously be better for most Linux on Linux workloads, but for BSD or Windows, it's pretty damned cool.

But they don't break windows from within the guest, into the host desktop environment. You see the entire desktop as a container.

It really depends, but generally, I want to use as much Linux as possible, and for me a bigger part of that is the UI than the hypervisor.

Microsoft pays extra attention to Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Not my first choices, but in particular you'll see stuff like AAD auth on Azure VPN supported on Ubuntu LTS. There will also be some work going into proper Intune support, if that matters.

I would prefer Fedora or Debian for a more stable environment, and use Arch at home, but we have to keep interoperability in mind sometimes.

Another thing to look into, and I really hate to since Broadcom bought them, but you can run Windows inside VMWare, and use unity mode to break individual windows out into your DE. Beware of the new licensing.

What's your use case that OSMC and LibreELEC don't work? I think those are going to be common recommendations, so knowing why they don't suit you would be helpful.

I was surprised to see it doesn't suck anymore, I'm using it with my mailbox.org and old gmail account. The state of Wayland native email clients isn't great, I'm really not sure what I'm going to do when I eventually switch to Cosmic.

What's more, it's attaching strongly negative feelings to a positive change. As a result, it's driving the wedge down the middle of our society as deep as it can possibly go.

You catch more flies with honey, and you can also use it to heal wounds.

A couple others, if MPD looks appealing, are Navidrome and Mopidy.

I'm happy to trade you some rain, just send some of your sun our way.