I don't know the reason for this but if I would need to guess then it's mainly about not being afraid of being sued to bankruptcy in the rare case something happens. Though I really can't remember reading about anything happening to a child in a news paper, so I assume (or let's say hope) no to drastic accidents happened on German playgrounds in the last years.

Never considered that health insurance might be an issue to come up with those super safe playgrounds. But yeah if your retirement is endangered by you kiddo climbing up a monkey bar set it might feel way more dangerous. Could maybe also explain to a certain why most European playgrounds are more adventurous then their US counterparts.

EDIT: Also tbh I really do think it's a good thing for kids to be able to climb up on things and explore stuff that might look dangerous especially to the small ones and learn how to behave their and how to overcome those situations and also learn to improve their body control at the same time as well.

He's not and btw the proper name for this used in German is "Misere" which is originally Latin meaning "have mercy" but the word is also used to just described something as a really bad situation.

But it has to start speaking to them in the first place and I think OP was specifically looking for the "conversation starters"

I remember it being like that already in 2014. The only thing especially annoying I remember was having to use optimus to manually switch between the "internal" Intel GPU and the dedicated Nvidia GPU to not run out of battery within an hour. But the whole set up thing was never an issue for me on Mint and Ubuntu even 10 years ago.

A lot of people did this at that company as well. But mainly my point was that it might be better to first get productive, or verify you can be productive with the OS you installed before you waste tons of hours configuring it in some obscure ways.

Especially since it was usually the ones straight outta university who did the fancy configuration, tons of alias, custom theming and so on stuff while most senior Devs using Linux just used default Ubuntu, Fedora or whatever installations. Something that just worked.

To a certain extent this is correct, especially if this person works or used to work an office job in the last let's say 15 years. But even then what are the use cases of office suites at home, mainly writing letters and maybe for the slightly more tech literate something like logging personal finances in a spreadsheet. In case of writing a letter those files are usually printed and the spreadsheet are usually considered confidential data. These people rarely, if ever, share those files with anyone, so interoperability is likely not an issue.

I'm therefore convinced if you just guide those persons to e.g. libre office writer and just say that's "The word" on this machine, they're going to be fine with it. Also almost all of these people use webmail instead of mail clients so the absence of Outlook is usually also not a problem.

Imho this includes 90% of the 50+ years computer user that can be migrated to Linux this way. The "problematic" ones are the ones who know some stuff, like how to click by click import my mail account into Outlook 2016 and want their new computer to behave exactly the same way and will go bananas otherwise. If I encounter one of those in my circle of relatives who need help with their computer I usually just leave them with their windows 7 machines or whatever they're using cause it's not a battle worth fighting.