I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I'm assuming it's normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the "Automatic" pick works.
If it doesn't work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.
Any software that is in the Xubuntu repositories will also be available in other Ubuntu derivatives, and most likely Debian and all its derivatives as well. Only the official spins are likely to advertise Ubuntu Pro.
Mint XFCE is a good replacement, but I'm also partial to KDE Neon, which keeps preinstalled software to a minimum and is by far the most performant KDE distro I have tried. I myself use regular Debian, with KDE, though you can choose XFCE during the install.
Not sure why, but a lot of other distros did something just like this in the past (see the comments about WUBI) and no longer do. Q4OS still has a .exe installer though.
I have to borrow a school laptop just to do proctored exams, because their "lockdown browser" doesn't support Linux, and even if it did, it seems to do some things in kernel mode, so I don't want it on my system.
Surprisingly, most classes at my university are entirely FOSS based, aside from that one piece of software, an obscure scientific program that only one assignment used, and MATLAB (which is easily replaced by GNU Octave.)
Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.
As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I'm not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.
This is nice but there are already tons of "how/why to start using Linux" websites. Not sure if we need another one.
Whenever you install or remove software, be sure to read through what's being removed. You don't want to accidentally uninstall something important. This is very unlikely to happen with official Debian packages, but you should be especially careful when installing packages outside of Debian's repo, as they may not be fully compatible with your version of Debian.
In any case, I'd log in to a tty (ctrl-alt-any function key) and install whichever desktop environment you had before using apt.
What makes this extra confusing to me, is that this doesn't seem to happen to the same extent for Invidious instances. I've only needed to swap between two instances on Clipious, whereas on LibreTube I was hopping across their entire instance list and sometimes not finding even one working instance.
It sounded like OP wanted to install Proxmox on their main PC, which would imply using it as a daily driver desktop OS, which it isn't.
I highly recommend playing Doom with the Crispy Doom source port and the Freedoom data files.
For something more modern, Xonotic is about the best-looking FOSS game out there and an excellent multiplayer arena shooter.
I hope that the rest of the space including the W3C sticking to their guns and opposing Web Environment Integrity prevents this from doing too much damage, but Chrome's monopoly is already at such an extent that many websites only test on Chrome, and a few outright require it. As long as this is implemented in Chrome, and if people who use it get more return from ads as the proposal suggests, some websites will be willing to implement it.
This is definitely seeing more and stronger opposition than the Encrypted Media Extensions proposal, but my fear is that it will go in that direction; if big websites implement it, Mozilla, Vivaldi, and W3C will eventually cave despite their initial opposition.
Doom was officially ported to Linux in 1994, and a modified version of Linux Doom was made source-available in 1997, then open-source (GPLv2) in 1999. It was one of the first high-quality open-source games. Those versions do not work on current Linux distros, but they have enabled modern source ports such as PrBoom+ and Chocolate Doom to be developed, and those are available in nearly every distro's repository.