It kind of a tough balance. Yes, unrestricted tech use is an issue for young children but on the other hand using tech while young is the best way to make it a natural part of your experience of the world and tech isn’t going away. If you go to the other extreme and say no whatever sort of tech period before a certain age are you setting the kid back against more tech literate peers? There’s also the consideration that’s been discussed around alcohol forever. By making it an “adult thing” and effectively a rite of passage to drink alcohol do you cause more problems and abuse in young adults than if it was always a part of their experience and the focus was on responsible use instead of total abstinence?

Sorry for the delay in responding, I was figuring out what device I was actually going to try setting Linux up on. I was originally going to just put it on the laptop that I use but I thought it might be better to test it out and learn on something else first. I got a Microsoft Surface that a family member was getting rid of to try it on. It’s an older one, they think it’s a 2017 model. It’s got a 100Gb hard drive and a Pentium processor. Since it’s a new to me device I’m not worried about saving anything on it so I can just overwrite everything and won’t have to worry about partitioning or anything like that.

I have not messed with the windows registry for anything. I think one AV would be fine, the redundancy was probably no longer necessary on windows, so I won’t worry about replacing malwarebytes. I do prefer free software but I only hate giving corporations more money than I have to. I don’t mind paying extra to shop local, I donate to the fedi instances I use, gog’s preservation fund, Wikipedia, and a few other similar things. If the money is primarily going to the people who are actually doing the work or to the cost of equipment and maintenance then I feel a lot better about paying for something so I’m willing to consider paid software if it’s better and will probably make some kind of donation to any FOSS projects I get software from if it’s free.

I’m not worried about keeping up with feature updates or always having the absolute newest version. I want it to be stable and functional so once I have it set up security updates will be the thing I’m most concerned about. I’m fine just setting an alarm and checking for updates every Friday or something like that. Background updates are nice but it’s not a big deal to keep up with it manually if it’s centralized into a repository. I use the desktop sites for discord and fedi so there shouldn’t be any issues with those. I use open office because it’s what I found when Microsoft started charging to use Office and it’s always worked fine for me but switching to LibreOffice or something similar isn’t a problem if it will work better.

Thanks for taking the time to respond and give me all of these links. It makes the idea of switching less daunting. I’ve read everything you’ve sent me and will happily continue to do so.

I’m closer to the average user than someone who has built a fortress. I use Firefox with ublock, ghostery, and privacy badger. I use the free tier of proton vpn. I run avast daily and malwarebytes weekly.

I think that I should already be close to best practices but I’m not sure how changing OS will affect that. I’m not really worried about being targeted for anything. I don’t think that I really do much risky beyond the occasional torrent or downloading a patch for a game. I get games primarily from gog, don’t open strange emails or click strange links, and use a password manager to generate secure passwords. One of the things that I’m most unsure about is keeping everything updated. Microsoft manages keeping everything updated for the most part on Windows and the last time I needed to find a driver anywhere except from Microsoft it came on a 3.5" floppy.

I use my computer primarily for single player gaming, discord, and fediverse sites. I need a spreadsheet and word processer, I use open office for that right now. I do financial and work related things on a different device.

Still checking in. I want to learn as much as I can. Thanks for the reply and the link. Links especially give me more places to look.

Am American, my advice? Just use communities/instances that don’t use English as their primary language. If you want to be extra safe avoid Spanish too.

Intensity is also important. One symptom of autism for me is compulsive tendencies. The things on the shelf have a correct order and it bothers me if they aren’t in that order. Food has a correct order to eat it in and I don’t go back and forth between things or mix things together. Various daily tasks have to be done in a certain order.

I don’t have OCD. The difference is that I can still function if these things are done wrong, it causes anxiety and agitation but not beyond a level that I can deal with. Someone with OCD might have the exact same tendencies but not be able to move forward without “fixing” whatever is wrong even if fixing it causes them injury or prevents them from dealing with more important things. Everyone wants to wash their hands sometimes. People without strong compulsions stop before their hands bleed.

Yeah but they didn’t limit the buffer. You had to wait 15min for it to load but once it did you could watch a whole low quality video file straight through with no shuddering or stopping.