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Got some IT help from a more network savvy friend. Strangely, shutting down, unplugging the power cable, and pushing the power button several times, was what it took to get my busted ethernet connection working again, at which point Eddie connected just fine and has remained that way every since. It's only been a few hours, so I'm not holding my breath. Will post back here if it acts up again. In the meantime, wifi is disabled, IPV6 is switched off, I changed the IPV4 to obtain an IP address automatically and to use one of two of the OpenDNS addresses you listed. I don't have a static IP, not sure why there would be anything indicating I do. Fingers crossed! Thanks for the continued assistance.

Pop!_OS is the Ubuntu-based distribution from System76, well known in the U.S. for selling and supporting Linux systems. They are doing work so that the experience of buying a computer with Pop!_OS preinstalled is like buying one with Windows preinstalled, but without all the bad strings attached. They're not the only retailer doing that, of course (we've got Tuxedo around German-speaking countries for example), but the most visible, because they've got their own distribution and soon their own desktop just lying around, waiting to be downloaded and installed. With a bought Windows PC, you can expect to simply install Steam, download a game and play it, just to name one use case. That's the thing Pop!_OS seems to be aiming at as well: Buy the computer, install Steam via the store, download some game and play it.

No, your experiences are on-point. I'm stunned as to why Linux Mint is still advertised like this. "But it was historically easy on newbies" – yeah, probably; let's put some emphasis on that little "was". Fedora, Pop!_OS or EndeavourOS, whether you want RPM, APT or pacman to be your base, are currently doing a much better job at this. And still that unyielding "start with Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you can't go wrong with that"… no, I think today you seriously can.

Clicking on those will lead you to the VirusTotal entries for both. You could post the links here for us to take a look. Be advised that, while one or two engines flag it as malicious, about 70 don't, so it's quite safe to assume false positives. I imagine those engines flag it because both are custom-built, some database has hashes for the "real" EXEs and a simple comparison was done. If both engines flag it due to a heuristic analysis, some additional caution must be applied interpreting the flag. In short, Eddie is not dangerous and its installation certainly doesn't warrant a wipe of your hard drive. If it is, why trust AirVPN as a whole, then? What's running on the servers is not known, and here you at least have the source code, so you know what's running on the client. It's a shame that Mr. Flx went all out and suggested that; even as a joke, you wouldn't have gotten it. It's also not "VirusTotal garbage", but a side feature of Process Explorer (which can help with identifying unknown running programs, as you did right there; you simply need to take that info with a bit of salt).