Thank you for the correction. I try to be as accurate as possible when providing information, but I misremembered the specs.

I have a Thinkpad T480 and I’m very happy with it. I paid about $250 (~£190) for mine. It came with 16 GB RAM, but is upgradable to 32 GB. The one I bought came with a 128 GB SSD, but I swapped it out for a 1 TB drive which added another $100 (~£76) to my initial investment. This model originally came with Windows 10 and most on the market will come with it, but can be updated to 11 if desired.

I personally have not used Win11 since they made some changes I don’t like, so I can’t really give you advice on that aspect.

I use Strawberry for mine.

More or less. I think there are some differences between the Q and K based models, but they’re close enough to not require separate ports of Rockbox.

You should look into Rockbox. It’s an open source alternative firmware for a variety of portable media players that adds features such as support for more file formats (and it runs Doom). As for which supported players I’d recommend then maybe a flash modded iPod or an AIGO Eros Q or K (also sold as the HIFI WALKER H2, Surfans F20, or AGPTek H3).

Are you referring to a drawing tablet? If so, then a good number of ones from the better known brands are supported by the kernel by default. Your safest bet though is Wacom. Wacom is definitely the best supported brand, but it tends to be more expensive than other brands (such as XP-pen and Huion). Non-Wacom branded tablets may require a little bit more initial configuration, like adding a udev rule (I had to do that for my Huion Inspiroy Ink).

In my experience larger packages (in terms of file space requirements) install slower, but download speed is a factor there too.

Cancelling compilation is safe to my knowledge. No changes were made as you stated. Just remember that the downloaded files will probably still be in your cache afterwards, so you may want to remove that with paccache.

You mention “partial installs,” but the actual issue is partial upgrades. A partial upgrade is when you don’t upgrade the entire system, but only one or more packages. A partial install isn’t really a term people use, but could probably refer to installing a package without its dependencies being installed.