Go to reddit, pick a username from the front page, use that. Any searching into your use of it will lead to that front page post and its reposts on click mills.
So this is definitely not for everyone but Thumb-Key is privacy friendly and designed to be used with just one thumb. I have used Thumb-Key (and it’s predecessor Message Ease) for about 4 years now and they are way easier for me than qwerty, there are fewer buttons so typos are less frequent and you can access all letter/numbers/punctuation while holding your phone one handed.
When it comes to security, particularly at boot time, fuck the user. Users don’t interact with devices at boot time so it doesn’t matter if it shows a blank screen, a mile of logs or a screaming clown penis. If it was up to users no device or service would have a password or security of any kind, and every byte of information about your life would be owned by 'The Cloud." Let the marketing wanks insert their logo into the Windows boot process,
Ram is pretty much your limiting factor. I run the latest version of Debian on a machine from 2008 but it only has 1.8GB of ram so for a desktop it is a little sluggish.
It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!
It’s a very good idea to take notes about the software you’ve installed and configuration changes you’ve made. When editing configuration files, it’s also a very good idea to include comments in the file explaining the reason for the changes and the date they were made.
This has saved me so much grief. If ever I mess up a system so badly that I want to re-install or when I want to set up a new machine, having a clear set of notes makes it a breeze.
Easy mode: LMDE/Mint. They are all geared towards a good user experience and trying to keep you out of the terminal. I would recommend them to any new Linux user.
For a slightly more advanced experience, Debian with XFCE as the desktop. The installation is slightly less friendly and they expect you to be familiar with using the terminal and tinkering with the guts of your OS from time to time but you can have a ‘lighter’ installation with less background services. (I run Debian on all my machines so I have a bias towards Debian and LMDE).
I’ve used VirtualBox for years and only just tried virt-manager. I wish I had tried years ago, so much simpler and it is in my distro’s default repository.
Debian, I use one Gnome extension but could easily do without it. All the defaults are fine if you just want to sit down and browse, edit media, create documents or write code.