Peertube is the distributed Fediverse platform. The issue of course is ability to monetize and discoverability, both huge issues for creators. No creators, no content.

Reguarding apps, you said typewriter, movies, music, games. Office suite look at LibreOffice. Movies and music if it is online just Firefox or any other browser you choose. Firefox is good at working with PDFs too. Any distro should come with a document viewer, photoviewer, video player, and music player. You can choose from tons of other or more advanced tools. Debian for example comes with over 60K packges and Ubuntu and Mint are similar. There are also 3rd party sources too. Flathub or Snapcraft for example if you want something not in the repos.

If you go with a Debian based distro with a lot of apps in the repos, you probably my not need these other app souces, but some people like smaller distros, something special just not in the repos, or a newer or different version of app. For example I use Joplin which is a notes app that is not in the Debian repos.

For apps finding an app name and starting links https://alternativeto.net/ is your friend. For distros, https://distrowatch.com/ is your friend. Strongly favor a distro in the top 10 on distro watch unless you have some special need.

Edit: You will notice that the top 10 are all Debian, Arch, Fedora, or SUSE based in that general order of more to less popularity. Linux distros tend to be based on these base distributions. For example Mint is based on Debian and so is Ubuntu.

I personally prefer Debian based distros just because of the number of apps in the software repo. Probably consider Ubuntu or Mint in your case. My wife and I have used Linux pretty exclusively for over 20 years. Ease of use is not that much of an issue once your setup. My wife and her dad are not technical and they have few issues.

Installing, and fixing issues is more technical but it is for Windows too especially if you do not get it preinstalled. You presumably have some stratagy for Windows support. Linux same, have a stratgey for it.

Just compare the number of possibilities. Number of words to the 4th power to 94 to the 15th power. Your corpus would have to be 25 million words. In contrast, there are about 800K words in the english language and about 1000 commonly used words.

This is a great example of how impossible it is not write down usernmes and passwords and how infeasible forcing changes is.

The other thing people do not talk about enough is user names. They should be somewhat random too and not reused. Forcing people to use their email address is particularly stupid but very common.

The missleading thing about passphrases is that anything a human can remember is low entropy. That it has 20 charachers says nothing about how random.

Edit: I also wonder how much randomness is really needed. Properly salted and hashed passwords shoud not need that much randomness. Lot of this is about users just choosing bad passwords, reusing, and IT not properly salting and hashingon their end.

Lot of security is theater. IT doing a CYA thing.

I wonder how much of this stems from two stupid IT policies. For decades users have been told to not write down passwords and to change them regularly. The result of this policy is to use a small number of password variations that one reuses. Then IT complaims about it.

The better plan has always been to use long random passwords that you never reuse and write them down by some method like a password manger and only change them rarely for example when they may be compromised,

The two downsides of a custom domain are:

• Only as private as the least private use of the domain. No crowd to mix with.

• Delivery through SPAM filters of other providers more troublesome. Delivery to AOL/Yahoo, and one of the AT&T managed mail domains has been the biggest issues for me. GMail delivery seems fine.

Do get a common mainstream suffix not the cheapest. Some filters may tend to filter some TLDs.

Edit: By the way, I have my own domain and the email for it is hosted at a hosting provider. I recommend it but the above are the downsides.

You can just setup an extender where you need it. That is what I have. No real need for mesh unless your place is really big.

The big advantage of RSS and Youtube is you do not have to login to follow you channels. Your only touching what you need and soyour footprint is a lot smaller. I just started using RSS for youtube a few months ago and like it much better.

People love to troll Firefox. There are only 3 brower sources Google, Mozilla, and Apple. I choose Mozilla or a derivative of them.

I mostly do. 99.9% of the software I use is a Debian package. Well on Debian anyway. I do have one AppImage.

Actually I use Ting Mobile and like it. I thought they were bought out by Dish or something? Or have they changed hands again?

I did not see: Do not publish your IP address. Do not run servicies on it. Do not point DNS to it. Prefer dynamic IP that changes overtime. Encourage it to change periodically for example reboot your boundary router periodically.

Also did not see: Do not present any open ports on the internet side of your boundary router especially no administrative ones.

Edit: Disable dynamic UPNP port forwarding too.

It did not see only use routers and other network devices with auto or at least easy regular updates.

Kind of felt like that before I retired. IT put so much shit on my computer that it was about all it was good for. One reason I retire, feedup with the BS form IT.

The update thing started maybe 10 years ago or was it 15. Company I worked for went from terrible patching to this BS. Why something in between was not sufficient I will never know or why it cannot hot patch.

Edit: Before the company actually did serious patching worms regularly took down the whole company for days. But why they had to go from that to interrupting presentations and calls is beyond me.

Actually staff and commercial vendors are keeping Windows. Plus no one gets fired for choosing MS products. That IT staff are all Windows certified means Windows will always be the answer. That users are similarly trained and need certain Windows software will mean they demand it too.