Yes, I do, so does my family.

What's wrong with XMPP? Genuinely asking.

Okay, but where's any of the Fediverse?

I'm always missing Conversations/Dino (XMPP) from chat apps. It does (almost) everything Signal/Matrix does but without a phone number and it can run on a potato.

I'm in the same boat, except I've never felt any kind of remorse. How often do you feel it?

Good. Good. Fossify has its own apps for clock, sms, phone and gallery. There's Ghost Commander for file management (its like Total Commander for Android) or Material Files on F-Droid. Alsi, I use Graphene's camera app. How do you do syncing or cloud storage?

1, Find out whether she needs any specific piece of software that is hard to replace. 2, Regarding distro, you should install her what you use, so it is easier for you to help. Ubuntu is well hated for a reason though (Canonical doing big tech things). I'd recommend either Linux Mint or Debian (if you are not a beginner in Linux and comfortable in the termunal) for both of you, but I'd wait until she passes her exams and may consider setting up a dual-boot on a spare SSD first, so she is able to try Linux and go back to Windows when needed. 3, Desktop environment: GNOME is considered best for ones coming from Apple and KDE from Windows. Both are resource hungry in my opinion, so I use MATE, which looks like GNOME 2 out of the box and uses a bit more resources than Xfce, well configurable though. Note that Ubuntu MATE is its flagship edition, many options are there out of the box (like MATE tweak).

Thick (~1m) mudbrick walls. I lived in a house like that for 2 years, it felt cold inside in summer.

Yup. I've been listening to 'You shouldn't be an astronomer, you can't make money as one'. Now I work at the state railways, I constantly have myself sent to school like driving a maintenance engine. You guessed right right I also got the 'don't work at the railways'. There's not much of my family I contact these days.

The Man from Earth is not forgotten, it has never been recognized. I've never seen such a great movie. The plot: a bunch of techers talking. That's it. But that talk is mindblowing.

Universe was my favorite of all of Stargate. It asked the best questions and showed how easy it is to die on a super advanced spaceship if there isn't fresh air and clean water. A shame it is discontinued.

A sysadmin couldn't install a Debian server, because the internet was unavailable. There were 2 net cards in the machine (either had an interface twice the size of the PCI slot it was sitting in, the other was regular PCI). My dear mentor put the LAN cable into the regular card, the told the installer to use the other. I told him to finish my work and installed the server for him.

Same sysadmin told me to graft two CAT5e cables. I wired a small cable (10 cm), starting with green-white at both ends, then grefted the two cables with it. Later he complained, that I made a crossed wiring, because the other cables started with orage-white. I couldn't explain, if you double-cross a wire it becomes a straight one. Then I told him, that modern routers configure themsefves, no matter how messed up the wiring.

At another company there were 3 pieces of free antivirus on every PC. A onedrive (free) account was our cloud service. The boss wanted me to teach the store manager how to develop a website and I had one week to do that, that was my last week.