Maybe one of the Fedora Atomic distros would be up your alley? https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

I don’t think NixOS meets the bill. You’d be learning and troubleshooting a whole new language just to setup your system and modify the core configuration.

How did you manage to convince them?

I think btrfs ticks all your boxes. I would suggest yabsnap for snapshots. Then if you want a backup off-disk use borg or btrfs has a way to transmit (sync) to a remote. Yabsnap has a command which will make a script to restore from backup, which you can review and run.

I have a Canon MX340 (maybe pixma?) that works with gutenprint. The ADF is a bit messed up but it otherwise works as intended. If you have a similar model, it will probably be supported.

I have DS4 working in Arch with Wine. As someone else mentioned, the hid-playstation kmod just worked out of the box. The key for some games to work properly was to add a SDL2 gamepad mapping.

Also see section 3.10 here which may be relevant: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamepad

I believe you can set dolphin to be like this. I have it so I can either double click to go into a folder, or expand it for the tree view.

It’s increasingly harder to exchange for fiat anonymously, especially when you consider XMR or other privacy coins. Once the people in charge of money realized they were a bit subverted, you got the huge crackdown.

I still use it for various things. Buy LTC from a legit licensed exchange. Move it around a bit. Change to XMR through an exchange that doesn’t care. Maybe move it around some more. It’s a giant pain, but I don’t know a better way. This method isn’t perfect, more of a balance of risk, but it’s better than just handing your entire entity over for a simple transaction.