Proton serves privacy, not anonymity. They will not collect, harvest, analyse or sell your data. If you however use their services for illegal things they will forward whatever - usually little - unencrypted information they have about you.

It’s not a question if encryption fails, but when. Paper ballots are anonymous by design, unless you mark the ballots they are untraceable. Digital ballots don’t have that feature.

At best you learn some basic formatting and table calculations, there’s no need to get specific into MS word/excel. There’s essentially no difference between MS and Libre office here. Same with the operating system, if you’re just sitting in an office, reading and answering emails in a browser you don’t have to care about the OS.

Besides, school should teach critical thinking and how to transfer skills, not shoehorn pupils into specific roles and software.

In Europe GDPR gives you the right to have all your data deleted. All you do is send in a request and SO has to remove everything of yours, not just anonymize it. There are some exceptions for legal reasons, eg where financial transactions are involved, but comments should not be exempt.

I don’t like Canonical either, hence my recommendations for Mint or Pop being listed first. But let’s be real, if someone wants to just get away from windows and wants something that works without having to learn much new, this is good enough.

Unironically, switch to Linux. Mainstream distros like Mint, PopOS or Ubuntu are very friendly for casual users, have GUIs for everything and if something does go wrong, the error messages actually have proper meaning and you’ll find tons of resources online as well as people willing to help.

Most stuff nowadays runs in a browser anyway, so here there’s no compatibility issues, office is available in Linux through libre office and gaming has come far with steam and proton.

You can always compile from scratch, compare the checksums or use the version you compiled. In projects this large people usually do this, and there’s a certain level of trust that these checks have been performed.

Mint looks quite similar, and if she asks “Microsoft applied an update and now the start menu looks different.”

If all she does is browse the internet and read emails, she’ll never know the difference. You could even set up the splash screen to display the Windows logo or just disable it all together.

Wikipedia itself is pretty great, the company and its marketing behind it, not so much.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/

You’re not banning part of the population from the polls, you’re removing anti-democratic elements. I’d argue this is an essential step for democracy to thrive.

I agree with everything but using Google sheets. It’s neither free nor open source. You don’t pay with money but with your privacy. Libre office is just as good as a desktop application and is actually FOSS. If you absolutely need the cloud storage, get a provider you can trust, buy the space and sync your files online, after editing locally.

The transition from EVs to public transit, biking, etc has to come eventually, too. We can however already do that and places have successfully done so. Look at the Netherlands for example. EVs are in the way of transitioning to better public infrastructure and will only delay it.

In 2022, it was ruled that the BfV may classify and monitor the entire party as a suspected right-wing extremist group. A corresponding lawsuit by the AfD was dismissed because “there were sufficient factual indications of anti-constitutional efforts within the AfD”.[36] On 26 April 2023, the BfV, after four years of investigations into the Young Alternative for Germany, categorized that group as a confirmed extremist organization. This allowed the chief of the BfV Thomas Haldenwang to place the youth wing under even more intensive surveillance than the tapping of phone and the use of undercover agents that had been the case until then.[45][46]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany

Just summarizing here. They are right wing extremists that have taken over old Nazi talking points and are gaining popularity with anti immigration, anti climate change and populist propaganda.