verassol

Consider antiX. It's very lightweight, supports 32 bit and you'll have access to the Debian Repos.

StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*

Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*

StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can't do that*

Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.

Perhaps Firefly? It is meant for personal finances but considerably complex still. I am not sure if it does invoicing though.

Edit: This should give you a more precise idea of how fitting it might be: https://docs.firefly-iii.org/explanation/more-information/what-its-not/#business-finances-small-business-accounting-payroll-management

That might be fun then.

QEMU can be as simple as this:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 mydisk.qcow2 20G

Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk.

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256M -cdrom alpine.iso mydisk.qcow2

This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you'll have internet access from within the VM.

It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it's great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.

Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G mydisk.qcow2

That's basically the same without the -cdrom argument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!

I think you might like DIstroSea. If you'd like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you'd like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.

have a principled objection to a service financed by public money forcing people to install and execute proprietary non-free software on their own hardware

You are on spot there, but sadly even legislators are far from understanding the reasons why this matters so much, let alone the general public.

Whatever security policy they have, it shouldn't require you installing a random executable to your system. And it was flawed enough that it didn't care to give your device access.

And by the way, it's so awesome you carry an ethernet cable around!!