It does have live versions for several DEs (gnome, kde, xfce, probably a couple others). If you have a bunch of spare usb sticks you could flash each of them into one and swap between them
Archive.org’s browser extension is a must for something like this, could archive everything by itself every 24 hours if configured
been using xfce4 since it's the default desktop environment for MX Linux and it's really rock solid whilst treading the line between a full-on DE and a WM. To me it's a lot more customizable than mate and has significantly more development behind it (can't wait for 4.20!). With that being said i don't necessarily have a problem with using mate and its app suite, the bottom being a taskbar instead of that just being part of the top bar is something i can get behind but you can achieve that with a panel profile on xfce just fine
there are people out there still (willingly) using windows xp, windows 10 is gonna live on for the time being
audacious too! though oddly enough they've gone back to gtk3 in recent versions alongside their qt version
standard, surprisingly enough, it's essentially just a shortcut to the key combination ctrl+shift+f23. guess microsoft figured they couldn't leave all the extra F keys unattended