GNOME. It’s what I happen to like but any DE should be fine.

I have a similar Mini PC as an HTPC. I have Debian 13 installed as the base OS. For something like this I want a rock solid stable base with long support. Doesnt get much better than Debian in that regard. KODI, Chromium, Firefox, and Moonlight installed through Flatpak. Works great.

DNS filering alone doesn’t work for YouTube in my experience.

Whoa this is cool, but I’m finding the voice to text to be quite buggy. Sometimes it works and other times all I get a bunch of emojis and weird symbols??

I learned early on you can’t rely on them for factual information for reasons you stated.

I use them for creative writing tasks (drafting up emails, letters, etc), generating ideas, for creating excel formulas, basic python, vba functions, etc.