I mean you’re not wrong it’s true to a degree, but especially in my parents case, they hardly store anything on the computer so the disk usage hardly registers on the pros and cons. If it provides convenience then it’s whatever. They’re still on an obsolete elementaryos but flatpak is still keeping them up to date until I can get around to visiting them again. If I understand how it works on debianland once a major version goes EOL, they’d be using backports which might not have the latest version right?

I did this for my parents, context: borderline elderly, late 60s, use their laptops for checking email, reading articles, and watching youtube. I visit every year or so and usually end up doing a little maintenance.

Probably my main tips are:

• Don’t pick elementary like I did years ago, I learned there’s no upgrade path between major versions and that’s been a pain
• I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates
• Set up some form of remote access, I’ve used teamviewer but in hindsight it would be nice to have WG to SSH in
• If I were doing it again today, I would probably use a universal blue spin for the atomic updates
• With my parents’ level of computer experience, as long as there’s a firefox icon in the dock then they’re right at home

Honestly there isn’t much to it, especially if they’re not tech savvy and aren’t doing anything complex. All you have to do is make sure familiar app icons are where they expect and that they know how to use the window decorations / DE. My only pain has been having to do a bunch of updates when I visit, so next time I’ll swap them to fedora and set up automatic atomic updates. Besides that, everything keeps chugging along because they’re not making any changes to the system when I’m not there.

Hopefully forgefed (based on activity pub) helps with this - in theory you could use your codeberg account to open issues on repos hosted on other instances. I believe forgejo is working on implementing it.

I’ve done a backup swap with friends a couple times. Security wasn’t much of a worry since we connected to each other’s boxes over ssh or wireguard or similar and used tools that allowed encryption. The biggest challenge for us was that in my selfhosting friend group we all prefer different protocols so we had to figure out what each of us wanted to use to connect and access filesystems and set that up. The second challenge was ensuring uptime and that the remote access we set up for each other stayed up - and that’s what killed the project as we all eventually stopped maintaining the remote access and nobody seemed to care - so if I were to do it again I would make sure all participants have alerts monitoring their shared endpoint.