There is a lot of ‘reinventing the wheel’ in software, and I did not claim otherwise.
When new abstractions are beneficial, other programs take advantage of them and the whole ecosystem moves forward. When they are not, nobody cares and they are ignored and die. In that respect, open source software development is very much like evolution.
Judging by apps using it, looks like this abstraction is indeed useful.
This is the sensible thing to do. Try a bunch of distros using either USB or as Virtual Machines.
It’ll save you a lot of heartache when you eventually kill the bootloader, the display driver or both (and you will, it is part or the learning process).
Yes, they have a 16bit/44.1KHz FLAC tier (€7.49), as well as a 320Kbps tier for lower data consumption and a 24bit/192KHz tier (€13.99) if you have the Hi-Fi gear to use it.
In addition to the basic hardware care (checking for dust, reapplying thermal compound if necessary) you can run powertop to check what is keeping your CPU awake when it shouldn’t and take steps to purge unneeded services or resource-heavy applications.