Between 2 and 3. I’ll show off my Linux setup to friends and preach to the choir, but I won’t rub my choices in the faces of people who use other distros or operating systems.

Because once you fall behind on anything, especially larger expenses, it’s pretty much over. You can’t recover from that unless you submit yourself to loan-hell.

Luigi time

Certainly. I’ve had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE’s xfce4-terminal, MATE’s Caja file browser, and GNOME’s Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won’t get in the way either.

Display manager won’t matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you’re interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

If OP indeed has the 6th gen iPod Touch, not the classic, it won’t be as rosy as most of the comment here suggest. From my experience replacing the battery on one, you need a hair dryer to loosen the glue and pry off the screen, then a soldering iron to replace the battery since its ribbon cable is directly soldered to the logic board. No storage expansion or custom firmware is available for such iOS devices, as far as I am aware.

Also watch out for low-quality replacement batteries, the first replacement I tried only lasted around an hour on a full charge.

Does that happen to be a variant? I replaced the battery in my aunt’s iPod Touch 6 a few years ago and did have to desolder the battery ribbon cable as it was directly soldered to the logic board. Took a lot of patience just getting to the battery too (screen is held on by glue unlike the clips/tabs in an iPhone).

Also interested to hear other people’s thoughts on reusing these old iOS devices, got one sitting around just collecting dust.

No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won’t prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.

Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you’re using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn’t automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.

Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I’m not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.

The desktop environment packages that tasksel uses (task-gnome-desktop, task-kde-desktop, etc) can be found towards the bottom of the list at: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/task-desktop. In theory, you can just uninstall the task-your-desktop package which takes away everything that DE came with. If that doesn’t work or doesn’t play well your earlier manual uninstallations, take note of the dependencies that the task packages pulled (including recommendations) and go about uninstalling the dependencies layer by layer.

Because hamburger menus do not belong on any screen larger than a tablet

It isn’t a dedicated font viewer, but I’ve used ImageMagick’s display utility to preview fonts.

Bog standard keyring. To keep everything parallel, the folding multitool gets a tiny sub-keyring and the metal USB stick gets a tiny carabiner (detaches to avoid load-bearing USB ports). Keychain goes in a velcro pouch that also holds a multi-tool pen, mini flashlight, and lighter. Pouch goes into front left pocket.

Linux Mint is your best bet. Intuitive for new users without any flashy features to get in the way.

All said, temper your expectations. I did this for a couple of my folks and the Linux partition just sat untouched until I next visited (and presumably thereafter). Despite updates for their existing Windows 10 ending. For an unfortunate majority of people, they don’t really care until their browser stops rendering pages, no matter how you proselytize Linux.

If you are passionate enough and have some money to spare, get a used laptop (240 GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 3rd Gen i5 at a minimum), preferably enterprise-grade (Latitude, ProBook, ThinkPad), clean it up, and pop Linux Mint onto it. Your folks can then experience Linux at their leisure, side-by-side with their existing machine at no risk. No fussing with boot order menus, which I have seen confuse computer science graduates.

Validates my feelings as a Debian user

The 1969 Apollo 11 mission. To capture the original signal from the lander and make backup copies of it

I am familiar with a child abuse victim who feels this way. Not like actively seeking it out, but they wouldn’t regret it much if it came to that point.

But I’m not personally qualified to comment on it. If it’s becoming more than a passing thought and starting to bother you in everyday life or causing actively homicidal thoughts, it’s a good time to seek professional help before it gets you into trouble.

RX 480, thinking of upgrading since ROCm support for it ended a while ago and working around it has become very painful

Physically yes. Probably not in the way you mean though. The lungs have no facilities to digest food, even if in the form of a rich aerosol (you’d get pneumonia). Perhaps a wayward molecule with caloric value or two could follow air swallowed into the stomach, but that would be very negligible.

Was fortunate enough to have good teachers and friends so it was mostly enjoyable. I sometimes joke that I peaked in middle school, when I finally came out of my shell enough to have meaningful friendships, but had still yet to experience any sort of academic-related stress.

I did once while abroad. None of the shoe stores had the style I wanted in wide, so I went on Amazon and found a pair which reviewers tended to say fit well. Particularly that the listed size matched their expectations when they tried the actual shoe on. Ordered the size I thought would fit me and it did in fact fit me perfectly. It lasted about a year until it started leaking at the glued seam, which to be fair, wasn’t too disappointing for a 48-Euro no-name pair.

Granted, that was for men’s hiking shoes, can’t really speak for finding good high heels online. Other than for that one-off occasion, I’ve only shopped for shoes and clothes in-person.

One less possible data point for tracking

Also not invested enough in my profile to bother

The average social media profile has just headlines and lead pictures, while a good blog also has articles