One thing I’ll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn’t really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don’t be scared of the terminal. It’s just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you’ll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.

Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won’t be able to install any programs this way but you’ll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It’s not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.

Gaming on Linux is better than it’s ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I’m just telling you this so you know it’s not like a flawless experience. Then again I’ve also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so…

My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it’s the most popular and has the most support.

Best of luck!

Nebula is an option for some content creators but it is subscription based.

My setup got messed up once after a kernel update that went bad and booting from the live USB and running the recovery install fixed everything for me

Only problem was that I had lost the USB, but luckily I still had my Win10 partition I can’t boot into and make a new one.

So it seems the lesson here is you don’t need another computer as long as you keep another partition with a backup OS on a different drive?

I’m a fan of Voyager. Very nice experience in my opinion

I’m using the android app and I’ve found it decent. I think the UI/UX could use some quality of life improvements but it’s a simple and straightforward app to use.

I’m not on the main pixelfed.social instance but mine went down for a bit this morning. I just waited a bit and then I was able to login again.

Mastodon and Lemmy also had a lot of trouble even they experienced these huge waves of migrations partly because no one had scaled the software this far before

Mastodon is an app for sharing text that can also share pictures and videos. Pixelfed is an app for sharing pictures and videos with limited text.

You can curate a feed of pictures on Mastodon by following hashtags like #cats or #catstodon, but the interface is going to always emphasize the text first. Meanwhile on Pixelfed I can follow those same hashtags and get a much better experience for a feed primarily of pictures. Even though many/most of the posts will inevitably come from Mastodon users I can still browse those in my Pixelfed app in a much cleaner way. Artists can post their work from a Mastodon account, but the best way to view all their posts is going to be from Pixelfed.

This is why interoperability is a good thing. The whole point of federation is that different apps can implement their own version of the spec to curate a different type of user experience.

I don’t do Instagram either but PixelFed has pretty chill vibes. I followed some hashtags like #cat and #nature and now I have a nice little feed of cats and nature.

Surprised Lemmy is so low tbh. It feels pretty active here to me!

Yea that seems pretty high. I have a solo pixelfed server that runs around $5 / month. It doesn’t get a lot of use though

PopOS is the only thing I have a few minutes away with

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Yup, I like Lemmy but there are still those subreddits that Lemmy can’t fully replace for certain sports teams I follow.

The people saying it uses your phone’s Internet connection are incorrect. The vehicles have built in cellular modems and connect directly. The OEMs negotiate cellular contracts to provide service in their vehicles with ATT, Verizon, etc.

Features like remote locking/unlocking, etc. would not work if it relied on being connected to a phone.

For starters doesn’t it only run apps from the Google play store?

Thanks, sounds like it’s probably not worth it.

Yeah that’s what I’m worried about. I just want an open source version of my smart TV that doesn’t have stupid ads on the home screen and trackers and works near flawlessly without all the fuss

I think it was mostly the parental controls we aren’t familiar with on Linux and I think she thinks it would be too “hard” for her.

I don’t agree obviously

Thanks for the advice. Yes I absolutely want her to have the opportunity to learn more technical stuff and be able to explore and play games. Also lan parties for games.

I just want some guard rails because we have issues with managing screentime and things like that.

I appreciate your input, I was also teaching myself to code by the time I was in middle school, but this is a different situation and some guard rails are needed to manage screen time and app usage, etc.

I’m not so much worried about her wrecking the computer and more about her wrecking her brain with unfettered access to the Internet