Not a requirement, just an accepted norm. There’s plenty of counter-examples on supermarket shelves, too (and why they all have 写真はイメージです (photo is an illustration only) on the box).

The quality and value of pancake mix really varies between countries. I’ve found that Japan, for instance, has really good pancake mix that is cheaper than buying the raw ingredients… Flour is rarely bought for home cooking, and there’s a generally high standard for store bought baked goods. In contrast, Australia has cheap flour and store bought baked goods are generally mediocre at best.

I think the main issue was that Mint doesn’t have good power management tools (so I used a third-party utility). Not a ‘gaming’ laptop but it does have a dedicated Nvidia GPU and I got the drivers working fine, and most games ran better than than they did on windows. I’ll check out CachyOs! Thank you for the suggestion. I haven’t tried Fedora in a decade (and not on this PC, obviously), so I’ll take a look at that, too.

Last time I tried (Mint) the dealbreaker for me was battery management. I tried various utils and settings but I couldn’t get as much juice of of the same charge using Mint and still have good performance. If anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful!

After 25 years of writing Japanese and trying many cheap and expensive options…

「Zebra Clip-on multi」

is my forever pencil (+pens).