This. To put it simply, people respond better to what’s familiar and to what has a clear goal. F.e. if you’re about to open a restaurant, don’t sell power tools in it. If you want to sell powertools, create a separate store

I never thought I’d witness the release of 3.0 in my lifetime

Yeah, well maybe you should put this into your graph as a choice. You might not like it but Ubuntu still has a major support for anything Linux related. Any manufacturer or software development - if they support Linux, there is a high chance that they mean basically Ubuntu, quite often they tested it just there. This is a HUGE advantage for any beginner.

Beginners don’t care about behind the curtain stuff, they just want things to work. And you might not like Canonical but Ubuntu does this

Can someone list those piracy subscription services so we can avoid them as responsible citizens?

I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I’d need to check it