And reasonably-priced love!
And a hard boiled egg!

I use GitHub Desktop on Mac and PC. It works fine with local repos, too.

I’m savvy enough where I can adult Lego a PC together but struggle when it comes to software and troubleshooting and really don’t have the time for that stuff.

Then Linux is not for you; it is nothing but troubleshooting.
If you have to use Windows, get the LTSC IOT edition. It’s official and it has none of the crap people complain about in 11 (copilot, onedrive, recall, etc.). I’ve had no problems gaming on it, either.

Given pihole’s recent record with updates, I’m not sure I want them firing automatically.

Unfortunately I can’t remember whether I downloaded pihole from some package manager within DietPi, or whether I used the instructions on pihole’s site. It’s not hard either way, it’s really just one package.

I run it for my pi-hole. It’s been great. It tells you when there are package updates when you log in, which I find helpful.

The .wav format is actually very simple. You should be able to write a bash script to produce wavs without too much trouble. If you’d rather not work that low-level you can always use the DAW features in emacs.

/s

How are you geoblocking?