I can’t say that I’m surprised when a privacy-focused company has a dose of unfounded or biased paranoia. For me, this is not reason enough to distrust them.

I also don’t fault them for doing away with SMS when most of the populated world had already moved away from SMS by then too. As a North American relying on SMS for about half of my messaging needs at the time, I wasn’t happy about it either. But I don’t fault them for making that decision, and ultimately it did push me to rely on more secure options, which I see as a good thing.

Since adopting a Flatpak and containerized workflow, the choice of distribution matters a lot less to me now than it did 10 years ago.

The majority of apps that I use everyday can be run from any host. And I can install fedora, arch, debian, or whatever I want as a container, whenever I want it, without any thought to my host system.

Ideally, Flatpak’s UX will continue to improve, and upstream app devs will continue to adopt it as an official support channel, which will improve overall security and confidence of the platform. Image-based, atomic distros will be further streamlined, allowing for even more easily interchangeable host images. At that point, traditional distros will be little more than an opinionated collection of command line tools and programming environments.

Fair points. I’ve only ever taken Mint for a quick spin and that was a decade ago. I just see it constantly recommended as one of the most user-friendly distros, thus the maybe recommendation.

Personally, I’m all in on Fedora Atomic for my hosts and (mostly) Arch in my containers.

I would maybe add Linux Mint to that list, but otherwise you’re spot on. Fedora and Ubuntu are the easiest and most robust systems for novice computer users.

Obviously, lightweight is open to some interpretation but Silverblue can be made very lightweight by simply uninstalling the default flatpaks. You’ll be left with a very basic GNOME shell and greeter, without any of the common GNOME extras. From there you could easily install your own window manager, greeter, and whatever apps you need.

For all its faults (and there are many), Huawei continually features some of best phone cameras available worldwide.

If all else fails, you can always spin up a Windows VM. I generally keep one around for tasks like this (or complex Excel workbooks).

If you’ve no prior experience with Linux, I’d say just try using it. For the average computer user, the overall experience will be very similar to Windows or Mac.

Go easy on yourself, and don’t try to do/learn everything all at once. Just use the system like you would any other. Once you’re comfortable with the overall experience, you can then tackle more complex stuff if/when you feel the need.

Edit: Just wanted to add that Fedora, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu are all solid choices for beginners.