I genuinely hadn't considered AbiWord because I thought it had kicked the bucket (it's close to 24 years old, after all!) and I was pleasantly surprised that development for it is still chugging along to this day!

P.S the mention of DSL made me remember Tiny Core as well. I love those two!

Passing the knowledge of the greybeards to new Linux users is a pastime that I enjoy—I'm glad that they've been useful in your journey as well!

Pardon me, but I made a typo here: Ghostwriter is NOT a replacement for Microsoft Word. It's anything but a traditional word processor.

And for Linux in general... there's definitely a /lot/ of reading and testing involved. I've been a Linux user for more than 15 years now -- and I can say that things have become easier and more convenient, but Linux will remain Linux. Having a friend in these times does help, though!

For word processor, it depends on the feature set that you need. I personally use Ghostwriter (ghostwriter.kde.org) for my creative writing, but I'm very much aware that's a replacement for Microsoft Word. For that, LibreOffice and Calligra Suite should offer programs with more Word-like experience.

Morgan von Asteria, at your service. I may not /have/ a Steam Deck, but I'm happy to help like always :-D

See, I knew not alone in this! My friends have been saying otherwise, making me look like a madman. To be fair to them, 5 years is also, kind of, the gap between the PS2 (2000) and PS3 (2006)—and we both know the generational leap that introduced.

My perception of time is all-around warped—either that, or my use of the word 'recently' should be studied—because I'd often say that an event occurred 'recently', only to realise that it happened four to five years ago.

I'm starting to think that I have elvish blood in me.

This has no bearing on the issue at hand, but might I suggest skipping over swap and creating EFI and your root ("/") partition first? Placing swap at the start may create an awkward partition layout when you wish to resize the swap in the future (512 MB may be too small, or even unnecessary!)

The horror of maintaining Flash as a Linux user back in the day was something I dreaded, so there was certainly a software barrier too. However, as normal user, that was my only 'realistic' issue with it—even once factoring in the fact that it was such a massive vector for malware.

Even the word 'machine learning' and 'neural network' have both been superseded by the more misleading 'artificial intelligence'. Everything that seems—in any way shape or form—'automagical' is now an 'AI'.