Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.

Probably because they are not actively working to make sure it works properly. So it is better to set low expectations vs having people get upset if they hit problems.

I run Truenas scale on home server and on the off-site backup at a friend’s house. ZFS Snapshots get synced to backup server nightly. The snapshot system is nice because it only needs to send what has changed since the last synced snapshot.

Now that I have it setup it is mostly no effort on my part. But the initial ramp up to understand Truenas and ZFS was a second job for a few weeks. HexOS may be good choice if you want the power of Truenas but the handholding of setup wizards and such. But HexOS is currently $200 and Truenas is free. Pay in time or dollars.

Linus has literally talked about that multiple times. He learns just enough to cover what is needed for the video, does the video, then forgets most of.

They are more entertainment and light education. They are trying to target a very wide audience, so they can’t really do deep on things. For actually learning I like LearnLinuxTV and LawrenceSystems.

Maybe start by focusing on exercises to help them build better emotional self awareness. My SO and I both have ADHD. So we try to make a habit of taking the time to “check in”. We both take a moment to examine how we feel and clearly communicate our status to the other person. Making that a daily practice with your kids would be a really good first step.

I would personally use Debian as my first choice then use Ubuntu if there is a reason to use it over Debian. For example Ubuntu will often integrate drivers for new devices faster than Debian. But if you are dealing with hardware released more 1 year ago, I wouldn’t worry about that. Also, some applications will specifically call out Ubuntu as their supported distro.

Chrome Remote Desktop works if she uses the Chrome browser and you only need occasional control when she present to authorize you getting access to her computer.

If your Internet connection is 1g or slower just about any desktop built in the last 10 years should be fast enough. The critical thing is having a good network card. Intel is generally very reliable for network cards and you can get used ones on eBay for not to much.

Keep struggling to be better than I was.

The suggestion I have heard is to have the remote machine connect to the machine on a schedule and pull the backups onto itself. Then your local machine doesn’t have direct access to the backups, making it harder to compromise the backups if hacked. But this also assumes the backup machine is locked down and isolated so it is lower risk than the local machine.

I think more important than which distro to choose is you setting up remote access for yourself. Tailscale and maybe rust desk or something would be a good idea. Or if you want to go further a vpn connection to a KVM device, some of them support being able to wire into the power button so you have full control. I would also have their account info in your password manager. Then you don’t need them to remember anything because you can do it when needed.

I just googled that model number and “Linux support”. The first result was the Brother website for driver downloads, which does include packages for linux.

This video has a similar discussion about the C++ programming language vs other programming languages that are theoretically better. https://youtu.be/I7fEsbksKRE?is=T53DqwVNM3ps97JY

The summary: An imperfect solution today is nearly always used over the perfect solution that will arrive at some unknown time in the future. Also momentum is a thing.