flatbield

Reguarding apps, you said typewriter, movies, music, games. Office suite look at LibreOffice. Movies and music if it is online just Firefox or any other browser you choose. Firefox is good at working with PDFs too. Any distro should come with a document viewer, photoviewer, video player, and music player. You can choose from tons of other or more advanced tools. Debian for example comes with over 60K packges and Ubuntu and Mint are similar. There are also 3rd party sources too. Flathub or Snapcraft for example if you want something not in the repos.

If you go with a Debian based distro with a lot of apps in the repos, you probably my not need these other app souces, but some people like smaller distros, something special just not in the repos, or a newer or different version of app. For example I use Joplin which is a notes app that is not in the Debian repos.

For apps finding an app name and starting links https://alternativeto.net/ is your friend. For distros, https://distrowatch.com/ is your friend. Strongly favor a distro in the top 10 on distro watch unless you have some special need.

Edit: You will notice that the top 10 are all Debian, Arch, Fedora, or SUSE based in that general order of more to less popularity. Linux distros tend to be based on these base distributions. For example Mint is based on Debian and so is Ubuntu.

I personally prefer Debian based distros just because of the number of apps in the software repo. Probably consider Ubuntu or Mint in your case. My wife and I have used Linux pretty exclusively for over 20 years. Ease of use is not that much of an issue once your setup. My wife and her dad are not technical and they have few issues.

Installing, and fixing issues is more technical but it is for Windows too especially if you do not get it preinstalled. You presumably have some stratagy for Windows support. Linux same, have a stratgey for it.

This is a great example of how impossible it is not write down usernmes and passwords and how infeasible forcing changes is.

The other thing people do not talk about enough is user names. They should be somewhat random too and not reused. Forcing people to use their email address is particularly stupid but very common.

I wonder how much of this stems from two stupid IT policies. For decades users have been told to not write down passwords and to change them regularly. The result of this policy is to use a small number of password variations that one reuses. Then IT complaims about it.

The better plan has always been to use long random passwords that you never reuse and write them down by some method like a password manger and only change them rarely for example when they may be compromised,

The big advantage of RSS and Youtube is you do not have to login to follow you channels. Your only touching what you need and soyour footprint is a lot smaller. I just started using RSS for youtube a few months ago and like it much better.