In the terminal session you launched firefox from:
Ctrl-Z # Temporarily suspend process
bg # Put that process into the background
exit # Cleanly close the terminal session
Or launch Firefox (or whatever application) with a ’&’ at the end to put it in the background from the start.
I think I’ve had the opposite experience. I use W11 for my day-job with a laptop connected to 2 monitors. It could just be the archaic painful apps that my employer uses, but it routinely moves windows to different screens if I lock the system and return a few mins later. I set the taskbar on each screen to only show the windows that are open on each screen, but often a window will be open on one screen but the taskbar icon for it is on another. To work around that I developed a routine when I return from my breaks - I move every window to a different screen, then back again, and that ‘fixes’ it - it feels so stupid to have to do this on an OS that’s built by one of the biggest companies on earth.
I think the equivalent issue on Linux might be due to Wayland and/or the desktop environment not keeping track of window positions, and there’s ample developer ‘debate’ about if/how that gets handled.
https://github.com/Manish7093/IBus-Speech-To-Text
I tried this in Fedora/Wayland previously, and it seems to work in most applications. It uses “VOSK” models which the GUI can download automatically - you just pick your language and desired model size when setting it up.
When I was exploring this a few months ago, I noticed speech recognition models have moved on quite recently (e.g. https://github.com/openai/whisper which can be run locally) but didn’t see anything integrating it into an input-method like the above.
I currently have an older relative using Debian/KDE with unattended-updates and few issues over the past year. Laptop was previously Windows 10, has had replacement battery and HDD->SSD swap, wouldn’t be supported by Windows 11, but is totally capable of running most modern apps.
Browsers can just be flatpak/snap/ppa and auto-update whenever, as Debian’s packaged (ESR) versions might get a bit dated.
From my own experiences with Ubuntu variants, I’ve always had some kind of issue when doing a release update, so I’ve personally stopped using it, but maybe thats just me.
Only significant issues I’ve encountered are with some flatpaks needing permission tweaks to (re-)enable printing, webcam, or filesystem access, and potentially over-doing the ad-block extensions/settings leading some sites to break - its worth setting up multiple browsers to pre-empt and work around those problems.
For remote access, it’s not a problem in my case, but you could potentially just setup a VPN with something like tailscale and just ssh over that. Once connected, I’d explore systems like VNC or KDE’s built-in remote access system. In the short/medium term, it would be easier to stick with X11 for that, but at some point, Wayland and those supporting tools are going to reach parity and distributions/desktop environments will drop X11 entirely - best to future-proof as much as you can.
For regular maintenance, it’s worth checking-in regularly to make sure the system and user is happy, and maybe setting a cron-job for house-keeping tasks (removing old kernel files and temp files, checking disk-usage/health), and having that notify you. But that probably depends how physically hands-on you’ll be.