X11 is still being actively maintained. It isn’t an install risk or anything like that. It isn’t going to add any shiny new features, but not everyone needs shiny new features. (That being said, if Wayland works for you, go ahead and use it. Just don’t spread FUD, please.)

Even better, store the password offsite—safe at a friend’s house, safety deposit box at the bank . . .

Sort of. The minimal install image provides a (lightweight command-line) Linux environment, and that’s what you would typically expect to boot into to install. If you have another piece of live media that you prefer, you can use it for the install instead (I’ve used Raspbian and its successor distros as hosts to install Gentoo on Pis from time to time), but there can be occasional gotchas that come from things like different handling of the resolv.conf file on other distros.

Just download the file marked “Minimal Installation CD” from here (assuming you’re installing to an x86_64 system) and mount it as a CD according to the VM’s documentation, then boot the VM.

Do use the Gentoo-provided minimal install iso as the host for the install, and not random live media, just to reduce the possibility of unexpected problems.

The handbook is actually pretty explicit on what commands you need to run for the base install. Read it through first. Take note of the places where you actually have to decide something (the biggest one is OpenRC vs. systemd, and you want to have that decision made before you start). Go with the default for anything you don’t really care about or that looks a bit complicated or scary. Absolutely do not skip steps (unless they’re marked “Optional”) even if you don’t yet understand what the step is for.

Working inside a VM insulates you from some of the worst gotchas you can run into on real hardware (like bad UEFI implementations), fortunately. Still, don’t try to build a custom kernel straight out the gate—just install the distro kernel for now.

If something goes wrong during the install, it can be best to take a break and come back later.

Once you’ve got the base system running, you’ll have another decision to make about X vs wayland and the various DE/WM/compositor options.

Another program you can try that no one has mentioned yet is Scribus. You will need at least version 1.5 to be able to open PDFs properly. Be aware that it is a desktop publishing program (analogous to InDesign if you’re looking at the Adobe family), so there are likely to be differences in the workflow.

(The method of absolute desperation is, of course, to install a Windows VM just to support that one program while you wait for the RFEs you filed against the piece of software that’s closest to being useful for her to be dealt with.)

Judging from the information on https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/, this is true, but not as true as it might appear at first glance. Linux for VAX is an obsolete(?) specialty port not available from most distros, and Itanium support has recently been discontinued, but I think Gentoo supports all the other variations listed. So BSD comes out on top by a hair due to continuing second-class VAX and Itanium support. The rest is just lumper-versus-splitter stuff.

TDE. Solid, familiar, stays out of my way.

Linux runs on just about anything, including arches you’ve never heard of. With arm, assuming you can get at the bootloader, your largest problem is likely to be assembling a compatible device tree if the manufacturer doesn’t provide one.

Gentoo doesn’t indicate there would be any issue with installing SELinux on an OpenRC system, and I can’t see anything anywhere that suggests the requirements differ by init system.

Not everyone does online banking (I don’t), and it’s possible to warn your family about scams. If the information isn’t there, you don’t need to lock it down. Of course, that just moves both the security and the accompanying inconvenience off the computer and into the real world.

If you’re not encrypting or RAIDing your root fs, you may be able to get away without an initrd at all. You just need to make sure you build enough drivers into the kernel to be able to mount the root fs. Once that’s done, the kernel will be able to late-load any other needed modules or firmware. (The machine I’m typing on right now has no initrd, and neither do any of my others.)

It natively require you to compile the kernel

Nitpick: precompiled kernels are now available as sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin, but you certainly can build your own (I’ve done that for two new machines in the past six months).

“sysrescuecd” which is based on gentoo

It used to be, but isn’t anymore. Try booting the Gentoo minimal install image for your arch instead.

Call me weird, but the cursors are just about the only visual element of my desktop that I don’t customize. Boring default X cursors all the way!

I doubt they could even run a modern OS with a light DE.

They could, actually—it’s been about a year since I retired a machine with specs as bad or worse that ran Gentoo with TDE, and it was useful enough for many things. Web browsing was not one of those things, however.

Unless you deliberately set out to compile a minimalistic custom kernel, less than half of them. Problem is, you may not be able to easily tell which half.

I think you might be able to deactivate this one by turning off XFRM support in a custom-configured kernel, at the cost of losing some types of tunneling. Not going to actually test that, though.

Evidently they’ve never visited one of those suburban subdivisions in their own country where all of the houses are built to the same blueprint. Same effect, slightly different scale.

The largest one is probably the lack of churn. I don’t have to relearn what things look like or how controls function every few years (or where settings have migrated to, or how to accomplish random-obscure-thing-I-might-need-to-do-once-a-year). It lets me get on with whatever I sat down at the computer to do in the first place, which was almost certainly not tinkering with the DE.

It’s also light on resources, since it dates to the days when a single core and 1GB RAM was considered a pretty decent system.

(Note that TDE, which is what I am using, is still well-maintained—it’s just that the people working on it consider keeping the original look and feel to be one of their goals.)

A dislike of minimalistic interfaces is not the only reason that I am using twenty-plus-year-old styling (older than Oxygen, even) on a DE of the same vintage, but it is one minor reason.

Real checkboxes can also take effect immediately, and have much better visual cues. The submit button was intended to save older computers the extra monitoring load of having to keep track of the state of every control all the time—it has nothing to do with control styling.