Oh, if you were talking about back then, then you’re right. At that point, compiling them yourself would’ve been a better choice, but with lower powered CPUs that was another downside. I never stood Gentoo because compiling times were way too long for me, even though I like Gentoo.
I would say OpenSUSE Leap. I tried many distros on my sister's PC (Mint, PopOS, Manjaro) and all of them got borked at one point by normal updates. The last one I installed was Leap and she still uses it without any problems.
Sure but Xorg has been like that forever and until recently distros started to default Wayland because of Nvidia, and there aren't many of them yet. Also some programs don't run well with Xwayland, some don't run at all. You're right from a technical privacy point but it's not the end of the world and it doesn't have to be privacy-invading, just don't run proprietary stuff. By the way, CInnamon will switch to Wayland, when the experimental support is mature enough. Don't know about MATE of XFCE.
Where is she? I can't see her!