I can second Posteo. Functional, affordable, FOSS, ecological and private enough for my needs.
banazir
Distros packaging software means that it is available to install with the package manager from their repositories. No distro provides every piece of software out there. This can be mitigated with Flatpak, Snap, GUIX, AppImage or, in a pinch, by compiling the required program yourself.
Sounds like you've already done most of the work. From what you've said, Fedora with Plasma sounds great for your use case. Good luck on your journey and glad to have you aboard!
I honestly liked 8.1 quite a bit - once I installed Classic Shell to not have to deal with the new UI. A first year usability student could have foreseen the massive issues trying to weld a touch screen UI and a traditional desktop metaphor would raise, but Microsoft for some reason were completely pig headed about making it work. It didn't. It can't. You can not staple two completely different UI paradigms together and have it work smoothly. Other than that, 8.1 was remarkably good experience for me. It felt really snappy under the hood. Good OS brought down by hubris. Well, good for a Windows release, at least. Use Linux.
3.11 was pretty good. After that it's been a mixed bag. A bag of shit, but mixed.
The current situation we find ourselves in makes me think of this quote more than ever:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H.L. Mencken
I have also been very content with Posteo.
Well, my opinion might not help you much, since I also love Transmetropolitan. But then, I also love Hunter S. Thompson's work.
Planetary is not much like Transmetropolitan, though. With Planetary, what I like the most is this sense of mystery. It's hard to describe. Planetary offers plenty of scenarios that open questions, only a few of which are ever answered, and that is kind of the point and appeal of it. It's also heavily intertextual, with a lot of references to other books, stories, comics and real events. It is, in fact, a study of the importance of stories in shaping our world, and our relationship with the stories we tell ourselves and each other. It's also a cool detective story with super heroes. It is many things. It is very sombre compared to the jocular Transmetropolitan.
So yeah, I love Planetary. I suggest maybe reading a few chapters to see if it grabs you. Can't hurt, can it?
With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It's a really light distro.
I was thinking of the same book. It's certainly appropriate for younger readers and should hold their interest.
I'm currently reading Planetary Omnibus, one of my absolute favorite graphic novels ever, before starting The Dragon Reborn, the third book in The Wheel of Time series, by Robert Jordan.
The Wheel of Time is a bit curious to me. Even though the books are long, they feel a bit too dense, meaning it feels like there's constantly something happening with no breathers, and new characters and concepts are constantly being introduced. I'd love if Jordan took a bit more time to paint the picture, so to speak. No wonder I've forgotten almost all of it in a few decades. But despite all that, I've really liked reading the books so far. I might finish this series yet.
I can't give you an in-depth comparison, but I have used both Mobian and postmarketOS on the PinePhone. In fact, I have pmOS as my primary OS and Mobian installed as back up right now. When I first got the PinePhone, I ran Mobian testing for a few years. It was a roller coaster, but that was to be expected. Eventually some issue or another drove me to try pmOS and I immediately found it more performant and stable. The difference isn't anything massive, though, as they run the same software, more or less. One odd thing I found was that with Mobian, my phone would noticeably heat up during calls, but not with pmOS. I don't know why. I've mostly stuck with pmOS since.
So, overall, I found pmOS to be the better experience. I'm not sure if their decision to add systemd to their OS will be a good one, but we'll see. Linux on phones is still in a flux. I had to give up using the PinePhone though, since the modem would mysteriously just vanish and a lot of smaller issues started adding up. Finally, MMS not supporting my carrier's APN settings was what forced me to look at other options.
Hope this helps.