NebLem

You really should encourage your contacts to use more secure channels than Twitter dms, especially for illicit behavior.

If you are a major contributor in a niche community, you can publicize your move with info of how to keep following you and syndicate links to your content on your desired platform for a set time then leave. On your desired platform let followers from Xitter know how to follow you (email, rss, bridgy, etc) if they don’t want to join your desired platform.

If you are mostly a content consumer or have FOMO, use a bridge not an account. DM all the friends you want to keep of where to find you then leave. Bird.makeup is a great Xitter bridge for the fedi.

In either case, there isn’t a reason to keep am account there.

Linux Mint and PopOS are usually listed as friendly distros and are derivatives of Ubuntu without Ubuntu controversies like Snap. Mint even has an alternative direct Debian base skipping some Ubuntu packages, so might be ironically closer to old Ubuntu in that flavor.

If you’re open to going non-debian, Manjaro is often sold as the more user friendly Arch. (Edit - a recent Manjaro controversy has people recommending EndeavorOS instead for an Arch wrapper. I’ve not tried that one myself).

Debian or Arch aren’t bad to use directly either and are far more newbie friendly than they were a decade ago even if not as out of the box opinionated as their derivatives.

Hashtags work on other fedi platforms, many people subscribe to lemmy communities elsewhere.