I...right now I'm kind of in disbelief that I am so far ahead of everyone else that I could *literally buy the entire planet for under $20USD,* and no one stopped me.

It's called progress. In my youth, we only had a bridge to sell you.

I reason (as is standard) that the only real way that my machine would be compromised is if someone has physical access; and if that's the case there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

This is incorrect. The main ways computers get compromised are as part of broadly-targeted attacks using open ports, trojanized downloads, and vulnerabilities in the web browser, email client and other network-facing software. For physical-access attacks, the main one is that the computer gets physically stolen, powered off in the process, and never returned, in which case having encrypted the hard disk matters a lot.

I actually think that 2020 could be the year of the Linux desktop

Linux has had the advantages it has for twenty years...so why now?

Urbit (https://urbit.live/) [? · GW] is in fact the future of computing.

This link seems to be broken.

under $20USD,*

Is this a reference to a missing footnote?