jutty

That’s the best, safest way. By the way, you can do the same thing from a flash drive too, if it has enough space to hold the system. I don’t mean as a live temporary system, I mean you can just point the installer to a second flash drive as the install disk and it won’t care.

For Debian there’s Preseed, for Arch there’s archinstall, for a Fedora/RHEL there’s Kickstart, for Alpine there’s setup scripts, for distros with fully manual installs, you could just write a script?

Automating your install is something any sysadmin and mainly any distro developer will quickly reach towards, so it is something almost certain to exist.

Though, if I understand you, you’d want that to be “sourced” from an existing system, yes? I can see the use of that… NixOS is likely the closest to what you want, since you are always defining a full declaration of your system.

The PC itself as in hardware? Hardly… Your data is at risk. So ignoring updates for both Mint and Windows will put you at a more vulnerable position from a security standpoint.

If you are asking if not updating Windows will make your Mint system insecure, the answer is no. At least to me an exploit leveraging an unmounted Windows partition is unheard of. It will of course make your Windows system less secure for the 2% of the time you do use it. Another side effect of updating it is that it may break your dual booting.

I use PDF Arranger a lot for that

https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger

I switched recently from neomutt to aerc and yes, if you want less complicated configuration, it’s a great pick. I find it less buggy and just best designed overall.

I never tried Gmail or Exchange on it, but this should have some helpful info on that: https://man.sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc/providers/