The display on my laptop is 4k and i can tell you i tried downscaling it was not as big a difference as simply turning the brightness down as low as was comfortable.

Sounds like me. I ordered it from a magazine and installed it from 3.5 floppy disks also. After that it was Debian and i used that for years.

I am aware of openwrt and used to use when I used router hardware. I have moved to pfsense. I install it on either a 1 liter mini PC or some other older enterprise piece of hardware.

I run an older dell xps 13. Its a bit under powered but most of my real work is done on a remote server.