Personally, I absolutely hate the /e/OS launcher. It reminds me too much of iOS. And I honestly hate it.
You can install whatever launcher you want. No need to stay on the default (don't like it either). One of my old phones has /e/os and I'm using Zim Launcher.
Arbitration typically tends not to be as neutral as a court. A court will always look how laws apply in a particular case. Arbitration may not do that. Arbitration takes power away from the consumer. Arbitration is not a court of law. It's a dispute between an individual and a company. Don't know how things are in Switzerland in this regard but I fear that it's not as neutral as a court of law would be. Especially as the arbitrator is pre selected by the company.
Also in their TOS "No Class Arbitrations, Class Actions or Representative Actions." i.e. if the company would screw over dozens of people they can only complain one by one even if they are all the same case. If a class action or class arbitration could occur the company screwing over dozens of people it could be viewed as a whole hence it might be determined that what they are doing is systematic, and if it would be in court it could be seen as illegal.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer or any kind of legal expert.
In their TOS: "XVII. Dispute resolution by arbitration"
"Binding Arbitration. -- you -- waive your and NYM’s respective rights to have any and all Disputes arising from or related to these T&Cs resolved in a court."
Use Gparted boot disk. It's a nice GUI program. It can resize partitions on the fly with data on them. It will move data within a partition if needed. I have successfully used it on XFS and BTRFS, YMMV. The usual advice of backup anything important is valid.
You are completely missing the point here. You replied to OPs comment about licensing with a comment about incompatibilities in code. My comment was about licensing.
If anything, based on the article and your post all I noticed is ‘how disgusting people many GPL proponents are.’
If wanting to keep FOSS as FOSS is disgusting to you why are you in this community in the first place?
Edit: Not once did I mention whether or not I agree with the posted article or the OP.
Since you seem to be pre-installing and configuring everything beforehand I'd recommend looking into OpenSuse instead of Mint as it's an enterprise oriented distro. It has a lot of easy to use gui and cli admin tools (yast) that make life a lot easier for maintaining the distro.
Why is asking for advice a bad idea even if there is a commercial interest behind it? At least OP is honest about it. Wonder how many of the "asking for advice" post over the years here and elsewhere have had some kind of commercial interest behind them and OP has not disclosed it.
Your criticism omits the passages about usage of the MIT license over the GPL (the ones I quoted in the post).
I’ve addressed it:
Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and ‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.
You did not address it. Possible incompatibilities in code level is completely different thing then releasing them with a not copyleft license. MIT license allows that a closed sourced version can be created that could, in theory, be used to replace the MIT licensed versions in what ever distro uses them. Copyleft licenses, like the GNU GPL, don't allow this. Recreating a well established and used core utilities, in whatever language, as a replacement to use, at first, in your distro and licensing them with a permissive license undermines the whole purpose of FOSS.
