They should not be worried, they should be educated.

If you worry a new user enough they’ll go back to Windows or Apple because there’s less scary warnings there.

We need to make the transition as pain free as possible. Learning about the joys of kernel compilation and SELinux can come later.
The first step is "Hey, this is as usable as Windows, without stupid ads in the start menu.

Aside from budget and time overruns it looks like they overshot the target of “futuristic” and landed in the middle of dystopian…

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

Depending on your level of caffeine tolerance/dependency actual coffee might be even better.

Alternatively: Decaf.

IF you already have an email domain you control.

Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”

Yeah, inductive charging is basically a must.

Especially because it eliminates the guesswork if the watch is correctly seated to charge

No actual technical solution here, but it smells slightly of XY-Problems.

From what you described it seems the main issues are

• too many calls
• not knowing who’s calling
• not wanting to answer the phone
• not reaching the phone in time

Maybe you could look into solutions like setting a custom ringtone for important callers or having the phone announce caller names so your mother can decide if she wants to make the effort to get her phone.

I’m speculating a bit here but I can imagine that getting up and answering the phone is exhausting for your mother. Also if her mindset is " a ringing phone means it’s important" that could make it even more stressful.

Maybe you could find a way to let her silence all calls except caregivers and ICE contacts. (On Android DND exceptions could work for that)

That way she doesn’t feel pressured to answer the phone every time it rings and stays reachable.

If it’s actually just the physical issue of reaching the phone in time, does she have a convenient way to carry the phone indoors like a lanyard?

Hope some of this helps you

There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

Coconut at least…

That’s a legitimate concern, but this can be easily mitigated by routing “guest” traffic into a VPN.

Guests might encounter more captchas than usual but better than no internet.

Ah, you “work” in “marketing”?

Wow, that sounds like a decent start for an architecture.

I’m tempted to spin up a few Jellyfin instances to see how it might work…

JellyFed(eration) would be awesome. It should use an anonymous overlay network so federation is not limited to people you trust in copyright-zealous jurisdictions.

Teenagers and a dog sound like Scooby Doo. No idea how specific the rest is.

It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.

That’s the equivalent of leaving the door open and hanging a sign “Internet over there” pointing at a wall.

Programs don’t need to respect those registry keys. If you’re worried about internet access, set up a firewall.

Also, if you’re worried about malware, the damage is probably done before anything connects to the internet.

B stands for Billion (Parameters) IIRC

No, No, they don’t understand everything and nothing!

I’m hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .

That has some major Lovecraft vibes… Have you read Equoid by Charles Arrows?