beginning??

have you been in a coma the last nine years?

if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.

fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.

silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.

as if that’s all it took to lower prices. companies are gonna look at this as ‘free profit’ and keep them high, pocketing the ‘savings’ for as long as they can.

my guess is someone big wants it and offered to pay enough to fund it, so canonical is just opening up the same support timeframe to anyone willing cough-up some cash.