To be honest, I’m not tech illiterate and still struggle with Mastodon. I struggle to search/find stuff to follow outside of my local server. I know it’s there and doable, but it should be obvious on how to find what I want to follow. If I struggle even a little bit with this, the average casual user, which these platforms will need for long term success, won’t even bother.

Not in my experience. They don’t know how to use the terminal and downloading anything shady online won’t install. No auto-updates, no bloat, nothing but what I put there. How would that not work?

Honestly Darktable works pretty damn well after you adjust to the work flow differences. I would still prefer Lightroom but after switching jobs and no longer using a company subscription for Adobe, Darktable is perfectly fine for my hobby photography.

Linux is perfect for grandparents or non tech savvy family if you set it up for them. Once it’s up and running, there isn’t much of anything they can do to break it.

This has been me as well. I switched to daily driving Linux after a week on windows 11. It hasn’t been 100% perfect but answers were so easy to find and implement. My shit works, and works well. More importantly it works exactly how I want it to.

I went with EndeavourOS

Certainly a good solution, but the vast, vast majority of people would not even begin to understand what you said here in any level, much less implement any of it themselves.