Empathy being a sign of privilege isn't the truth I needed to read today :/

Yep! Though now that I've seen that, I'll use Data's preferred pronunciation when talking about the character

Nope. Definitely don't say it like that!

I don’t know, because I have no idea how the Star Trek character says it…

We still don't know...

Is it federated/does it have social elements?

I ended up giving up on darktable for that side of things. I do my organising, keywording, rating etc in Digikam, and then use darktable just for editing.

Instances that don't have email approval, captcha or manual approval, tend to get defederated pretty quickly, because they attract spam bots

I started transitioning at 41, and that was 8 years ago. You've got this.

As for the rest of your post, you're putting the cart before the horse. Your priorities will change. What you value now isn't what you'll want in a year or 5 years. That's because not only will you change, but the world is changing and your family and friends will change with you as well, as the relationships you have with them shift.

The advice I can give you is focus on what feels like a good next step at that moment in time. It's not about knowing and planning a specific future or outcome, it's about giving yourself permission to explore, and experiment and find out what works for you. It's giving yourself permission to acknowledge that this is all new, and you don't have the answers.

I guarantee that your relationship with cis passing as a goal will change. I'm not saying it will go away, just that for newly self accepted trans women, the focus on the medical and physical steps of passing is often all consuming and the lens through which we see our journey, but it rarely consumes the same amount of headspace for trans folk that have been out for a year or two. Again, I'm not saying it will go away, but as you journey down this path, the things that will matter to you most will change, and invariably, they won't relate to cis passing in the way you think they will.

So for now, give yourself permission to explore some things, and start exploring. And then just keep doing that.

CachyOS, because I wanted something arch based due to the archi wiki and rolling releases.

My media boxes run Ubuntu, but that will change when they get rebuilt/replaced at some point, most likely to Debian

There will not be any corrective steps anytime soon, because the UK government, who would need to implement those steps, is actively disinclined to make them, because even though it's less transphobic than the previous government, it is still doing transphobia for political reasons.