Was raised roman-catholic but got disillusioned pretty quickly. I was fairly religious in elementary school but by the time I was 14, I was agnostic/atheist.

Partially because my parents aren’t religious (my mum is from the GDR, so she didn’t grow up with religion and my dad seceded from church before I was even born) and even my grandma, who was the religious one (albeit never very strongly, compared to American catholics. More a „goes to church on religious holidays“ type of person), drifted away from church quite a bit after all the child-rapist priest shit that was uncovered at the time.

By now (mid 20s) I’d probably consider myself agnostic. Can’t prove there is no higher power but also, if there is, we wouldn’t know what religion – if any – is right anyways. It’s probably not christianity though.

Same here. Couldn’t use Apollo anymore so I downloaded Voyager instead.

Yep. Look at something like the PinePhone. It has hardware switches that can disable camera, microphone and all types of wireless communication, respectively. And no need to degoogle, since it’s not googled in the first place (runs either Manjaro, PostmarketOS, Mobian or whatever you put on there yourself). Only drawbacks: it’s not really cheap for the specs and a little hard to find these days. But there are probably comparable devices out there.

A good replacement for people who can’t get away from MS Office might be OnlyOffice. Looks like MS Office, uses the same file types and is free of charge albeit not open source.

But the point where you’d have to set up a VM for someone who’s not technically inclined is probably not the point for them to switch to Linux.

Also, I think the problem with Linux‘ reliance on terminal commands is less that it’s not possible to avoid them – a lot of distros, like the ones you’ve named are indeed very easy to use without – it’s that if you try to look up a tutorial for anything, it will be using the terminal.

For example, if I search on DDG for something as simple as „how to update Ubuntu“, only the fourth entry mentions that there’s a gui updater. The rest tell you to use apt via the terminal. It’s not wrong of course but that’s not what my mum would want to see. And even with searches like „how to install vlc media player on mint“, while the first result does include how to do it via the gui, it’s the last of four options explained in the article. The first three use the terminal again.

Stuff like that happens a lot in the Linux world. And that obviously breeds the conception of Linux‘ complete reliance on the terminal to function properly. The community oftentimes is not very newbie friendly, if said newbie doesn’t want to jump in the deep end.