Quiet small upgrades are good. You do a couple of them and your rail network becomes a lot more usable.
Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines
I don't think this is as useful or easy to do as it might seem, because track gauge/electrification standards are all over the place and sharing tracks with normal trains makes your HSR unreliable and constrained in terms of scheduling. Even normal rail lines barely share track because you don't want issues from one line cascading onto another
in my opinion a big requirement is longevity. If I'm going to recommend a distro to someone new to Linux, I don't want them to go back to w*ndows because their distro gets unsupported. That's mainly why I like mint, Debian and arch.
as much as I like Wayland, I don't think it's a hard requirement yet. I like mint because it's extremely well polished. You really have to try it out to actually see it, but it's insanely well done.
I've had more problems with my turing card on x11 than wayland (kde), with random issues with the application menu and weird colour management. That said wayland isn't very good on that card either.
I think nvidia cards are just bad in general and comparing x11 vs Wayland on nvidia is like comparing different types of feces
there's things that only work on Wayland though, like smooth touchpad gestures and waydroid
There aren't any drivers because they're already in the Linux kernel, preinstalled. if you don't know much about Linux, you won't know the reasons for choosing one distro over another. the best way to figure it out is to try a few out.
Specs aren't too important. I like my distros lightweight, and a web browser will be the most demanding thing it'll run.
web browsers are pretty fucking heavy these days, I think the minimum spec for an "ok" experience is a 3rd gen quad core "mobile" chip like the 3612qm or an 8th gen quad core "ultrabook" chip like the 8650u
one of the best things about a phone based server is that it consumes basically no power at all