To fill up 510gb worth of emails would take an eternity

You can use the Polycentric protocol on Grayjay, though I doubt any creators actually read it.

The next best is probably to pick a phone from DivestOS’s list of supported devices, and preferably ones with a re-lockable bootloader

GL.iNet has a mesh router based on OpenWRT and supports WireGuard.

https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-b1300/

I have the Flint 2 and like it quite a lot but don’t have experience with this other router.

Watch videos from Naomi Brockwell. She covers many privacy topics and makes it easy to understand

I personally haven’t ever had it that difficult. My laptop has an nvidia card running mint and is dual booting with Windows with no issues. I’ve previously setup an encrypted Ubuntu on an external drive that can be loaded on any computer without issues. I’ve used Bazzite on an all AMD modern gaming powerhouse, and Kinoite on two laptops with integrated graphics with no issues. Also KDE Neon on a crappy old HP Laptop with no issues.

So you may have done something wrong in the process of installation, maybe your USB drive was corrupted, or maybe you tinkered alittle too much while not knowing exactly what you were doing.

Good points

I suggest Fedora Kinoite. An atomic version of Fedora (meaning it’s hard to mess up and easy to revert if you do manage to f things up) and it uses the Plasma desktop. The kernel is quite up-to-date and everything feels modern. I’ve transitioned a few noobs from Windows and they haven’t had any issues besides learning basics that are just different than what they are used to.

Mint with Cinnamon feels outdated and Ubuntu is a thing of the past with questionable tactics and goals.