Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well, this allows members to have public discussions in twitter format without a third party controlling the platform.

Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it’s captured by my system snapshots.

I’d start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you’ll find uses that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

+1, I used EndeavourOS

I had to set one of these up for my SO a couple of years ago. I dropped EndeavourOS on it, installed btrbk and configured automatic snapshots on a schedule and before package installation/update in case she managed to bork things by pip installing things into system python.

Fedora would probably work well too if you want a lower maintenance burden. I hesitate to suggest Ubuntu or Debian or their derivatives since you’ll probably want to be somewhat current with your Nvidia drivers.

I wrote simple hooks for my package manager to fire system snapshots before I install or update any package. It’s a nice safety belt that I’ve never actually needed to use, but if I do need it it’s there.

I wouldn’t bother with the cdr or dvdr either, they’re likely to be dead too in 30y.

We usually find solutions or workarounds to Nvidia driver issues within a day or two in the Arch community. The absolute worst case handling I’ve had to do was fork the Nvidia dkms package at the prior version (think nvidia-dkms-550) and run that until Nvidia themselves released a fixed version. Still pretty straightforward.

The most helpful advice I can give to anyone running a distro maintained by folks with day jobs is “take system snapshots before updates” - do that and the worst case fix to any update problem like this is still really easy to handle, even if you’re 10 minutes out from a work call and an update just went wrong.

Personally I’d just drop a note on the old user profile pointing at the new one and hope for the best. Portable accounts isn’t a solved problem in the fediverse yet.

I like pairdrop/snapdrop or Google quick share

I stood ready to pay and then the cashier said “now I just need your phone number and you can pay”. Hold up. What. I did not expect that, I honestly had a burst of anger inside me (never gonna take it on a cashier, they are just doing their job). I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.

“Sure thing, It’s +XX 111 222 3333” Just give them garbage.

Compliance with sanctions from the US and EU IIRC

Not to my knowledge. The US is it’s own special flavor of carrier-specific phone hell.

Look up the exact model of the phone then check GSMArena or a similar site to see which bands it supports - then check to see which bands your carrier requires.

Also, in the US I usually recommend eBay or swappa for phones - their buyer protections are robust and it’s almost trivial to return the phone if there’s an issue that isn’t disclosed in the sale listing. Buying used/refurbed things on Amazon is a crapshoot in my experience.

I moved my elderly mother to ChromeOS and I no longer have to deal with the IT burden of supporting whatever she installed or broke this week. Move your parents to Linux if you truly enjoy being an on call unpaid helpdesk

Well his great great great grandchildren’s yacht collections aren’t going to pay for themselves you know

I’ve had the idea for a while to use an LLM to gather metadata about books for me as well as generate tag lists for themes, plot, writing style, etc for everything in my ebook library. You could also generate non spoiler plot summaries and produce recommendations for similar books.

I leverage btrfs or ZFS snapshots. I take rolling system level snapshots on a schedule (daily, weekly, monthly and separately before any package upgrades or installs) and user data snapshots every couple of hours. Then I use btrbk to sync those snapshots to an external drive at least once a week. When I have all of my networking gear and home services setup I also sync all of this to storage on my NAS. Any hosts on the network keep rolling snapshots stored on the NAS as well.

Important data also gets shoveled into a B2 bucket and/or Google drive if I need to be able to access it from a phone.

I keep snapshots small by splitting data up into well defined subvolumes, anything that can be reacquired from the cloud (downloads, package caches, steam libraries, movies, music, etc) isn’t included in the backup strategy. If I download something and it’s hard to find or important I move it out of downloads and into a location that is covered by my backups.

Quick someone draw duckbutt

I recently had to explain to my boomer mom why a Ring doorbell was a bad idea. She didn’t seem to get that the system is cheap because it’s constantly feeding whatever it sees to both Ring and your local cops.