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!

It makes sense that they’re playing it safe this time around. They’ve already had successors to well selling consoles due to gimmicks (*ahem Wii U). The Switch is already a well selling console so it seems like they’re just making the same thing but with better performance and some usability improvements.

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

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for. She’s not great at managing her electronic time yet and she needs some guardrails to make sure she’s not staying up all night watching YouTube videos and things like that.

But I also want to give her the opportunity to learn and explore

It acts similar to a VPN connection and is able to block network requests to tracking sites/APIs.

I’m a software engineer, and I’ve used Linux on my computer for work before when my company allowed Linux installs on their computers (most don’t in my experience). I don’t recommend it for you.

For me, my main productivity tools, even proprietary ones, run natively on Linux. I very very rarely have to do anything involving word processing. When I do open source or in-browser word processors are enough. Windows can also be a constant headache to use in a lot of software development settings. It’s a horrible development environment. I try to avoid working on Windows as much as I can.

When something breaks (and on Linux, something eventually will), I have more than a decade of technical experience in computing I can fall back on to fix the issue myself. My work computer has failed to boot before and all I had to diagnose and fix the issue was a black screen with a terminal prompt. Even my company’s outsourced IT company had very little experience with Linux and I was largely on my own to fix it when things went wrong.

For you I don’t think it would make sense for basically all the opposite reasons. I imagine you’ll be doing heavy word processing and editing a lot of documents that need to be formatted correctly. Browser based and open source word processing are probably not going to cut it. I’m not sure if there are any proprietary file formats you may come across in the legal field, but if there are do you want to have to ask people “could you send that in a different format? I can’t open that on Linux.”

If something goes wrong on your machine you may not have all the experience to resolve it quickly on your own which could impact your business. Windows can break too but there’s a lot more support out there and the barrier is much lower to fix most issues (I can’t remember the last time I had to bust out a terminal to fix something on windows)

For all its faults, windows is pretty well set up for your typical use case.

If there’s a compromise here, you could try having a computer running windows and another running Linux. Having a backup in case something goes wrong isn’t a bad idea anyway. Dual booting is also an option. I made it through college for a CS degree with a dual boot Windows+Ubuntu laptop.

Whatever you end up doing, be sure to have a really good plan in place for backing up everything you need, especially files. Your computer can fail you at any time, Windows or Linux.

I setup my own pixelfed instance to share pictures of my kids and family. I own and control all the data on my server and no one gets to monetize pictures of my children.

Not many of my family members are on there but I still prefer it to Instagram

He is actually correct. The math does check out.

The minimum wage in 1938 was worth about $5.44 in today’s money. The peak minimum wage adjusted for inflation was in 1968 which would have been worth $13.46 in today’s money

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States

I can’t go back to working in an office full time anymore. It would be a really difficult adjustment especially losing the time to commuting and needing to deal with child care. Plus we found that we no longer needed a second car anymore since we were both at home so we sold one. Our life is built around not having to commute anymore.