X is lighter but have already soldered in RAM. T series are a little bit more bulky but pretty much anything can be customized. Be wary of the t480 and t490 though. Those have some flimsy charging ports that if broken will be impossible to fix.
Doesn’t seems to be an official ban. My friends in Vietnam are still able to access Steam just an hour ago. This is most likely a situation like those manga websites black listed by Comcast or AT&T DNS.
Most people I know who use Linux wouldn’t trust Cloud services cause that’s just storing your stuff on somebody else machine. You can self hosted service like Next cloud on a raspberry pi or just get comfortable with networking enough to setup VPN and ssh into your home computer from the net to get your stuff.
10.11 is still a hot mess for large home media collection. Especially one with images mixed in. The team doesn’t even seem to prioritize fixing all of that before moving on building new features. Music collection are also slower and albums meta don’t load correctly anymore. I would hold off from fully converting to it if you have a large collection