California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it’s so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there’s a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It’s not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.







I see people recommending Debian but you also said you enjoy tinkering, so I’d recommend SpiralLinux. It’s basically Debian but it uses BTRFS so you can roll back to a previous snapshot if you break something. I don’t think Spiral has updated to Trixie yet so you’d need to manually upgrade but that’s not too big a hassle if you do it immediately.