In matters where the judgement of the courts cannot be trusted and I would be jailed either way, I’d rather have the option to wipe my phone.

Counting all injuries to date, I think I would. Probably with a concussion and blood all over me though. My face would be in very rough shape from how much I’ve picked at it in the past.

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.

Sorry if this analogy has already been thrown at you dozens of times, I like to think of DNS like an address book for the internet. On a traditional phone, I can’t just type in someone’s name, I have to type in a number. Without DNS, the internet would be like that, accessing any website would require recalling and typing in the IP address. But DNS translates domain names (hence Domain Name System), the part of the URL leading up to .com, .ml, etc, into the proper IP addresses for you.

Unless you self-host, the DNS service is hosted on someone else’s server, and many devices default to communicating with the DNS server in plain text. Which is why you want to trust your DNS provider since they can keep a list of which sites you visit. And DNS over HTTPS mitigates the possibility of interception by encrypting your DNS requests.

Worth it, especially if you are stuck with the phone. Find FOSS equivalents of the built-in utilities (gallery, files, etc.), disable what you can (judiciously) with uad-ng, block the apps that can’t be disabled from network access using Rethink DNS, and use the websites of services on a computer browser instead of apps whenever possible.

It’s still far from what privacy ROMs can do for you, but until you can get a GrapheneOS, etc. friendly phone, taking some action is much better than just letting the spyware run wild.

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.

Are you keen on using wireless headphones or speakers? If not, I’d go all the way for one without Bluetooth so the thought of present or future vulnerabilities won’t have to cross my mind whenever I use it.

In addition to the Bluetooth vulnerabilities other commenters have mentioned, a recent one affects headsets with Google’s Fast Pair feature. Once forcibly paired, an adversary can register the headset with their Google account. The headset thereafter pings nearby Android devices as part of the find lost devices network and can be used to track the victim.

Not sure if they are in production any more, but I can recommend the old iPod-looking Walkman and Sansa MP3 players. Currently also using a no-name iPod nano clone for the fact that it has a microSD slot, even upgraded the internal battery a few months ago.

Any hidden screws or seams to pry? Is there alternative firmware for it?

If not, I’d imagine your only options would be physically crippling the bluetooth module, porting something like OpenWrt to it, or getting a router that doesn’t force Bluetooth on you.

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