Not in this chain, but it can likely be determined from your comment history by anyone who cares enough to put effort into it. A quick, less than a minute scan through that was enough to figure out that you live in the UK, and that you lived in Edinburgh during the first decade of this century.

Way too late to be worrying about that now. You’ve already posted it, and nothing you can do at this point would noticeably mitigate those types of risks.

For fully remote anywhere in the midwest is good as long as you don’t need the big city nightlife. You can buy a starter house in the rich parts of KC for 500k, or a nice house in the middle-class areas.

There has to be a small unused area at the start for the partition table. 2MB is far more than is needed for that, but leaving less would tank performance due to the fs blocks and disk blocks not being aligned.

I know Gentoo has it masked for testing with this note, which is probably the same reason why other distros without the same mechanism don’t have it at all:

Testing. An upgrade from 102 isn’t recommended due to downgrading most likely not being possible. Back up your profile before attempting. Fresh install should be fine. Bug #910229

I’ve seen the first chart in a lot of news stories, and it’s a scary graph, but that second one looks positively terrifying by comparison.