Same for me, XFCE is light, stable and efficient. I believe that’s the reason it’s chosen for Debian as default DE

Dell provides XPS laptop with Ubuntu on it. It works great and Ubuntu can be replaced with other distro ( I did successfully tested Mint and now Debian 11)

Agree to that, especially for video cards and Wi-Fi. These two can be hard to deal with… If your laptop is Wi-Fi only and you don’t have a USB/Ethernet adaptor you may not be able to connect to the net at all

Yes, agree with you, especially your last comment: disable entirely IPv6

Keyboard is absolutely a thing to be careful with. On Android mobile, use OpenBoard for example. On computer, if you use Linux, also install kloak [https://github.com/Whonix/kloak], a tool that slightly delays randomly your keystrokes to help you hide your typing pattern that can definitively identify you