I went with Mint because my technical knowledge of Linux is very basic at the moment. I imagine I'll jump to a more hands-on distro as my familiarity with it increases. EndeavorOS looks interesting.

And what are they going to do with that money they 'saved'?

I think we live in a time period where seizing/searching phones doesn't need the physical device to be present. They just have to ask Google and Meta to do it for them. Different than literally combing through the memory on the device, but not much. It's why FOSS and selfhosting matters so much. What Google and Meta don't have, they can't just take. That being said I would bring a burner if I went to the US. Lord knows I have said more than my fair share of critical things about the US government lol

You look up what Googlebot does. No AI. You want to know what crawlers do AI? Just search for "AI", or "training", or some such, or skim through. It's not long. Google-Extended collects training data. Note that Google-Extended is explicitly not used to rank pages. Did that help?

I'm sorry to inform you that there are already some stores in America that have electronic price tags that update automatically.

I appreciate that! I’m in the states unfortunately