Amusingly the last Signal outage I remember was actually caused by Musk when he tweeted "use Signal" and so many people did that it took down their sign-up servers
XFCE is fine, it seems to largely behave and while it doesn't have any bells and whistles it can do everything it tries to do fine. Gnome on the other hand... everything I wanted it to do required a plugin which had since been broken by a new version. Plasma seems great so far!
I just moved to Plasma from XFCE and my first thought was wow, this runs fine on old hardware, why have I been suffering through the 2010 experience when I could have had features all this time!?
I think the calendar not sharing is by design, they don't want your info to be readable by any other app.
As for email offline, can you not set up a generic email app to sync your proton mailbox? Not something I've ever needed to do but I'd be shocked if there aren't guides for it.
I set up Mint for a non-techy relative on their old desktop.
Their use-case is almost entirely web browser, so there was no need to cover installing programs. Click the same browser icon and it should behave basically the same way.
No need to explain the terminal beyond "this is where you can type advanced commands, you don't need to worry about it".
If there's an error message, read it and try to understand what it's actually saying rather than just dismissing it. Do a web search if you're feeling confident, send me a photo of the screen if you're not.
Explain how to install updates (or just configure automatic backups and updates for them).
Explain when and why the computer will ask for a password (e.g. login and updates) and how that password is for the computer, not for their email or whatever.
Explain the basics of folders. This is your home directory, here's where downloads go, here's how to create a folder and drag your files into it.
Tell them not to panic. I've seen a lot of older people terrified of pressing the wrong button, make sure they know how to understand what they're doing and undo their mistakes.
That's cool, could be useful if you wanted to limit your usage or something like that. Instead of constantly opening an app and scrolling to see what's new just set the RSS reader to poll every 24 hours and only look at what it presents you with.
Ooo interesting, I use this for specific communities but I hadn't thought about using it for a whole feed. How does it fare for something like Top Day, does it just update once a day? And how does it even know about what I'm subscribed to?
Amusingly the last Signal outage I remember was actually caused by Musk when he tweeted "use Signal" and so many people did that it took down their sign-up servers