After having recently restored some stuff from an aging external hdd, i’m seriously considering getting a few dvdr discs and burning the important things every now and then.

I know they don’t last forever either, but - just as a random example that has definitely never happened to me hahaha - you can drop them from a height of 3 feet and still get files off them!

I mostly agree - however there are physical/mechanical reasons behind the use of some of those. For example, Phillips head screws will ‘cam out’ (driver will slip out of the screw head) rather than get over-torqued, which is useful in various situations - although TIL this was not actually an intentional design feature!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out

Hex keys are better than a Robertson (square head) in tight spaces with something like an Allan key, and, in my experience anyway, Robertson can take a fair bit of torque, so they’re great for sinking into softwood - and also for getting out again, even when they’ve been painted over.

Flathead screws, on the other hand, should launched into the sun

This is very similar to my story - end of support for win7 meant putting Mint on the HTPC.

Soon after that, it was the old laptop my spouse was about to chuck out. Cinnamon was a little sluggish, so I eventually landed on Debian + XFCE

And when I discovered I could get my desktop’s audio interface working on Linux (it’s firewire, and by most people’s standards, ancient), it was game over for Windows.

I don’t know what Freetrack is but I hope it gets implemented for you :)