I suggest setting up Timeshift so it can backup your drive daily and keep several days worth. This way when you or an update screws up your system, you can simply restore to the last working version.

The notion of an “agreement” with Putler is laughable! The only agreement he’s capable of not breaking is one he makes at the Hague to spare his life in exchange for peacefully dying in a cell somewhere.

Have you tried Waterfox? It satisfies most of your requirements, I believe.

I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade and distro hopped quite a bit. Mint used to be my happy place, but recently within the last 5 years or so I’ve been on Arch derivatives. Endeavour was never stable enough for my liking, but Manjaro has been great. I did have to go back to a snapshot once, fairly recently, but that was primary because I fecked it up and not due to an update.

You mentioned that you have tried several Arch-based distros, so I’m not sure if this includes Manjaro.

Personally I use 24 hr time and YYYY-MM-DD date format almost exclusively, but here in the US you’ll get a bunch of people arguing and frothing at the mouth that MM-DD-YYYY is way superior because you say “March 16th 2025” instead of “2025 March 16th” and 24 hr clock is called “military time” because they are the ones using it. So, in short, it’ll take a lot of effort to change people’s habits.