Agreed.

Indeed. It's stupid. Mint is better than many other distros, but I can't say it's good. It has pretty much modern functionality day-to-day-wise (AFAIK, I haven't used Windows 10 or newer much, and Mac not at all), but even things like updating, repairing file systems after not unmounting before disconnecting something, and other necessary but rarely used functions are like Windows 98 level at best - sometimes DOS. If it wasn't for increasing privacy concerns with Windows, I would have stuck with it. Open source philosophy is better, but the current state of the distros I've tried is definitely not. Nor the availability of information, when problems occur.

Same here. In general it works good, but in some cases it's like they have their priorities backwards, regarding what they make easy. I soon need to upgrade from 19.3 in order to keep getting security updates, but it's a "major upgrade", which is high risk and requires command line knowledge. I can do it, unless something goes wrong (which I estimate to a 40% risk), then I'd need to know every detail about how the system works to troubleshoot and correct it. I always take full disk backups before upgrading, but that will only get me back to the old version, not help me with a successful upgrade...

Thanks

Were phosphates a health hazard? I don't remember, I was young when they were banned where I live, but the main reason for the ban here was eutrophication.

There are simple and cheap water alarms that can help keeping watch for leakage. A good, small investment, that can save a lot in water damage, even though it's of course best used as an extra safety and not to replace keeping an eye out yourself. Murphy's law and all.