As I understand it, automatic transmissions are a lot less common in Europe and manuals are almost non existent here in the US. Maybe a manual transmission forces you to be more engaged with driving than an automatic?

They aren’t entirely wrong. Grocery stores often have a bread aisle with loaves that probably fit that description. Many grocery stores also have a bakery department that has bread baked in house. I looked at their nutritional facts online and my local grocery chain says there is no added sugars in their sourdough. I know a couple of local bakeries near me as well. Not all of our bread is wonder bread.

I remember hearing about System76 a while back. They manage Pop!_OS which comes preloaded on their stuff. I don’t know much more than that. If you are mainly looking to replace your laptop because you don’t want to switch to 11, you could always try out Linux on it with a live USB. Basically you format a thumb drive to act as a boot drive. There are resources online on how to do it and it’s pretty simple. It doesn’t mess with your current install. If you like it, you can fully install it later.