I stand corrected, .NET Core is open source and uses the MIT License.

As in
“We’ve finished taking all we need from the Mono project and implemented it into our proprietary .NET implementation for Linux, Android and iOS. Instead of getting flack for killing off Mono (which is open source and would’ve been forked anyways) we graciously give this old husk to the Wine project. We recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET. kthnxbye!”

Good thing that it went to Wine I guess, as they do lots of work to get old Windows programs up and running in Linux and that often involves Mono.

Info that could help others help you:
House or flat?
Renting or owning?
How large an area do you need to heat?
How many rooms?

Temperature and savings:
Where I live they say that a house with people living in it should be at least 16°C (~60°F) to handle the moisture we generate.
Humans should have at least 18°C (64°F), preferably 20°C (68°F).
That means that you could close doors and let unoccupied rooms have lower temperature than the rooms you use.
If you’re stuck with space heaters then you’ll save quite a lot that way.

For details follow the link. This is nothing more than the headlines.

Finances
The GNOME Foundation reserves policy says that the buffer is too low to run at a deficit any longer, which it has done for three years. This years budget is a break-even budget.

Strategy & Fundraising
A five year strategic plan has been prepared and a draft approved by the board. A variety of fundraising activies will be launched over the coming months.

Board Development
More directors are being added to reduce workload on individual board members. Non-voting officer seats will be added for the same reason.

Elections
Annual board elections is coming up, 6 seats are being elected.

If it works, it works and staying close to defaults means less worries about updates breaking stuff.
I use the workspaces a whole lot more now than when I first installed GNOME but I still want my taskbar with appindicators.

If you start missing the classic taskbar and startmenu it is easily available in GNOME too:
Startmenu: ArcMenu
Taskbar: Dash to Panel
App Indicator: AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support

Soldered RAM has better performance and reliability while consuming less power than socketed RAM and users of budget machines rarely want to upgrade. If you find one with socketed RAM at that price, colour me impressed!

For an upgradable laptop frame.work comes to mind but even their outlet is $200 above your budget.
https://frame.work/marketplace?outlet[]=Factory+seconds&outlet[]=Last+gen&outlet[]=Refurbished&availability[]=in_stock&availability[]=coming_soon

It’s a problem if a projects wiki doesn’t have complete information, but I’d say that’s true whether it’s about their mailing list or something else.
My text was a simple quote from GNUs mailing lists page, so they definitely have it documented.

I’m not a user of mailing lists, but I can see the use of having all correspondence neatly delivered to your inbox where it can be subjected to whatever mail client rules you want. Especially if you are active in dozens of lists.

If you’re using wireless then you could try disabling power saving on the wifi card. It will drain more battery but the only reason I can see iptraf helping is if it wakes the network card.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/269661/how-to-turn-off-wireless-power-management-permanently#315400

Sweet! Here comes a random tidbit now that your problem is solved.

Easy screen mirroring of android to linux:
Prereqs:

1. Setup DHCP to always assign the same IP to the phone.
2. Install adb and scrcpy on the Linux machine.
3. Allow the linux machine to usb debug the phone.
4. Allow wireless debugging in the phone settings.

.bashrc function:
#Connect to Android and view phone screen
#Tip: If using PIN on lock screen you can unlock by entering PIN + Enter even if screen is black
function phoneconnect(){
sudo adb start-server
adb tcpip 2233
adb connect <phoneIP>:2233
scrcpy
}

Simply write phoneconnect in terminal when both devices are accessible on the LAN and you can remote control your phone. Some applications will blacken the screen on the computer if sensitive data is shown.

Which version of KDEConnect do you run in Linux Mint? Seems like they package an old version from what I gather when searching for answers:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/can-not-pair-android-phone-and-linux-mint-21-1-desktop-with-kde-connect/1455
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1b5fvay/how_do_users_of_mint_or_other_debianbased_distros/

Are your other machines running distros with more up to date repositories?

With your EDIT my first thought was “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”.

In regards to irc I recommend setting up a bouncer:
https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC

In order to receive messages from a mailing list you must subscribe to it. Additionally, many lists either require that you be subscribed in order to send messages to the list, or that your message must be approved by a moderator if you are not subscribed. See listinfo for a catalog of the various mailing lists. Each list in the catalog has a link to a page where you can subscribe to it.
https://lists.gnu.org/

I imagine these could be good starters for you:
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-system-discuss
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social-discuss

I mean the beautiful thing about linux distros is how customizable they are. My GNOME is much more similar to a classic windows workspace than what the developers intended thanks to extensions.
Personally I chose Fedora (gaming VM) and Debian (servers) as my first distros because I wanted to start with distros without upstreams and as they’ve been working out fine I haven’t felt any need to continue downstream to other distros.
I am a bit curious to try Arch and Gentoo, but that would be on a secondary pc for fun.

Regarding muscle memory I setup shortcuts and some custom bash to make switching between my fedora and the windows pc at the office easier. And it was a whole lot easier than it would’ve been to make windows accept default linux shortcuts.
Super+E opens Nautilus for me, Super+D minimizes all open programs and Super+R opens up a terminal.
Writing excel in a terminal windows starts LibreOffice Calc while writing calc opens Gnome Calculator.

An option is to buy a router that supports openwrt and install the travelmate package:
Quick Start Guide:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-quick-start/start
Travelmate Readme:
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/blob/master/net/travelmate/files/README.md
Supported hardware:
https://openwrt.org/toh/start?toh.filter.supportedcurrentrel=22.03|23.05

Then you could setup Wireless WAN (Connect to existing WiFi) + Wireless LAN (for laptop/phone) + Ethernet LAN (for server) in that router.

Never tried doing LXC for it but with kvm/qemu you can use vfio and pcie passthrough if you don’t need the gpu in your headless server.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

Are you calling me old? :(

The network isn’t a bottleneck in my system.
I don’t have any 20gb bluray rips as I’m satisfied with the quality of a 5-8gb 1080p.
I don’t notice a delay when starting it, it’s just a datastream without transcoding.

If the software you want to run has flatpak then I imagine you can try out Fedora Silverblue, Jellyfin do have a flatpak.

Personally I run my Jellyfin on a virtual Debian Bookworm server with transcoding off, my Jellyfin clients don’t need the help.
I always clone my Jellyfin server before apt update && apt upgrade to be able to rollback.
Oh, and my NAS (network attached storage) isn’t on the same machine, my Jellyfin server use Samba and /mnt/media/libraryfolders, so cloning it is quick and easy.