laserson

A close family member of mine is developing Alzheimer's disease. He can still take care of himself but is getting more difficult to converse with. He loses things easily, and every once-in-a-while gives us a scare because he decides to leave the house and doesn't tell us about it.

What tools, devices, apps, etc do you recommend that could improve his safety and/or quality of life (and also our peace of mind)?

My contacts are a gross tangle of partially duplicated records between Google, iPhone, etc.

How do y'all manage your contacts?

There have been lots of startups trying to take on various apps in people's lives (e.g., Superhuman for email, Cron for calendar, etc.). Are there companies focused on managing contacts?

Is it easy to live on a Linux laptop nowadays? I'm a scientist and so I generally need a *nix environment for work. But I am also just a mainstream user, and I also a good chunk of time in in Microsoft Word/Excel, and depend on easy availability of common apps (e.g., Spotify, Slack, Evernote, Adobe Creative Suite, Dropbox).

I realize that Linux has a solution for pretty much every problem, and is extremely customizable. But I really just want it to be easy and maybe 95% the way there.

Any recommended rigs for this?