This is what I did. I narrowed down the distros I was looking at to about 5 that I thought might meet my needs, and made a live usb for each one, then used it as I would my regular system for a couple days. Anything that didn’t work right got eliminated, and I picked the one I liked best out of the ones where everything worked.

If he’s keeping Windows to begin with, then logically he may still update it. It’s helpful to know that it might mess up his Linux installation.

Installing an iso from a usb drive and installing an iso after mounting it as a virtual drive seem like they involve roughly the same level of technical skill to me. Booting from cd or usb was a routine school or business activity for decades. Mounting an iso as a drive has been built into Windows for a much shorter period of time. The last time I used Windows, you needed third party software for that. I would bet on a random person off the street to be able to do the first one more reliably than the second. But, more installation options are always better.

So, it’s a GrapheneOS-developed competitor meant to address F-droid’s perceived limitations?

Running up-to-date software gives me far less problems than running software full of bugs that were fixed 5 years ago, personally. If you find a new bug, you can at least report it and hope to see it fixed in the next update. You find bugs that were fixed years ago, but the fixed version isn’t in your repo, and then you have to start building things yourself.

I have no reason to believe the average person can’t manage a usb stick. They’re a common way for photos, videos, and records to be sent from one business office to another. I’ve never worked with anyone who had any particular difficulty using them, and my coworkers weren’t all especially intelligent or interested in computers.

I"ve been experimenting with both Cosmos and XFCE Wayland.

Color pickers, screenshot, and window recording/streaming all don’t seem to work or require Wayland-only packages that are extremely primitive in features and use.

Alt+tabbing out of games, whether fullscreen or windowed, also doesn’t seem to work.

Wallpapers and cursors installed to the standard location where the distro installs all of them don’t seem to be usable. I have to manually copy them to somewhere in the home directory in order to use them.

Screensavers seem to be unusable except for one port of xscreensavers.

I know OpenSUSE plans to eliminate x11, so I’m trying to get used to Wayland, but I do hope it’s more developed before I have to use it full time.

It can also be run as a standalone background service, so you don’t have to have a browser window open all the time. I’ve run one for years. Super easy.

I liked Parrot a lot when I tried it. Very easy to use.

I’ve never heard of Accrescent. How is it better than F-droid?

That seems so insecure. I wish governments cared more about the effects of data theft on individuals.

Good to know. I think I maybe logged into webmail once, years ago, but I don’t care about any of the info listed here.

No reason why the forks can’t continue their own independent development. If they do disappear, I guess I’ll use a webkit-based browser, or maybe a Gemini browser that also does http.

Nothing wrong with preferring something you’re familiar with and know meets your needs. I enjoy trying out new programs, but I end up using whatever meets my needs the best whether it’s new or old.

I like Sakura. It’s lightweight.

7b is the smallest I’ve found useful. I’d try a smaller quant before going lower, if I had super small vram.

I see. That’s all useful to know. Maybe when I get solar, someday…

I don’t remember ever being fingerprinted to get ID. Maybe when I got a passport as a kid, but never for a driver’s license.

I would watch this.

You sound like you know a lot about it. Have you done Monero mining? I looked into it and figured I’d be losing a little bit due to electricity costs, but it might be worth it anyway. No worse than the exchange rate between two currencies.