Different distros are better for different things. For example, some require give you more control over the OS but are more difficult to learn, or require learning more things at once. Others will be easier to try out but may make choices on your behalf that you don’t like - or distribute software in ways you don’t like.
Linux from Scratch will have a fairly steep learning curve. Nothing wrong with that, but you’d want to prepare yourself to be cool with things breaking or not making sense for a while.
Puppy Linux is minimalist, which is something people usually only want after they’ve tried out something else that’s not minimalist. I would recommend trying out something more general-purpose and try out different desktop environments and applications first.
You can burn em with your burner of course. I haven’t burned discs in so long that I can’t remember what software I used to use, but there should still be open source, free software that can do exactly that.
If long-term, secure storage is your goal I’d go with redundant, error-correcting digital storage with off-site encrypted backups (don’t forget the password!). A proper system like that will survive a tornado (because it’s backed up off-site). A home-built RAIDZ2 NAS with one of many off-site backups will work very well. If you don’t want to figure out how to build that system, you can also just buy a NAS with a similar level of functionality (I do still recommend RAIDZ2 with at least 6 disks, though).
Blu-rays will eventually degrade, either from scratches or a slow phenomenon where they get little holes in the foil. Even if you keep making copies, you’ll run into this problem. Of course, data corruption can also occur for files on a computer, but that’s why you use a strategy that keeps ~3 copies of each file around (basically what RAIDZ2 accomplishes) so that errors can be auto-corrected.
There are other benefits to a NAS as well. You can store your own backups of your other devices there as well and have them backed up off-site. You also have the option to share your blu-ray rips over your home network, basically running your own local streaming service.
If you want to share the love, so to speak, the bandwidth of a USB hard drive is actually pretty great.
That’s ideally science but you’re gonna have low-impact papers if you don’t do the “look at this new thing I ‘proved’” song and dance. Publishing culture and self-promotion in academia make everything worse.
Incidentally, I know someone that tried publishing a paper to explain why a very common method actually led to bad results very often. It showed methodology and had verification from another group using independent materials. The paper was rejected because, “everyone knows that method X works great you must’ve done something wrong”.
There’s a lot of myth-making in how science works, following prescriptive announcements of “the scientific method”. In reality it’s just humans trying things out and using “good enough” ideas regardless of how well they are investigated. If the ideas are truly 100% wrong in a way that precludes further work, they’ll get discarded. But wrong ideas can still persist for decades or more so long as they don’t disrupt other things working well enough. That methodology earlier was “good enough” despite major flaws so the academy said, “it’s actually 100% right” right up until they abandoned the method (which they did for unrelated reasons).
Per the other reply to you, you might recall when I went over our consensus perspective on Ukraine, how it is motivated by understanding the best possible outcome for Ukrainian lives and contrasting this with the bloodthirsty liberal approach you’ve supported (all dressed up in “concern”).
Is it the “uninformed” and life-devaluing comments you’re referring to?
Alcohol refers to an alcoholic drink (like the martini held by this sophisticated cat). Water and ethanol (99% of these drinks) are miscible, so are always at least a solution with one another. The additional flavor compounds that make drinks different from one another tend to be in solution as well.