It’s a credit card/payment processor thing, i.e. ultimately it’s visa/mastercard, but it’s up to the bank to offer to individuals. It’s often available in other anglophone countries if your talk to your bank but I’m sure in some places they wouldn’t do that. But yeah, years ago is too long anyway.
Idk (I’m not op) but I think when people say “can I install Linux on this” everyone knows they mean gnu/Linux. Yes, if I’m picking a container base image for my CI runner obviously alpine is also Linux, and if we’re talking about kernels then Android is too. But if we’re talking about desktop OSes then I think it’s close enough.