You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t?

This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.

Okay. You’re still doing tech support either way. I have no way of knowing how much free tech support you’re willing to give, hence my caveat of how much you’re willing to support them.

Netflix would disagree. People feel like they’re supposed to be getting access to a service, and if they’re not getting it they’ll complain to the nearest party to what isn’t working. In this case that’s you or Netflix being asked questions about why the router isn’t working.
That it’s wrong or irrational has nothing to do with who’s getting asked the question, and who’s the first line of troubleshooting when the service doesn’t work.

If people didn’t ask the wrong people questions, Netflix wouldn’t need support articles on how to reset your router.

Honestly, you’re supporting a chunk of her network by being a media provider in the first place. “It won’t play” doesn’t usually come with an assurance that it’s not a device or network issue.

Neither plex nor jellyfin seem remotely worth the effort to provide to others in my opinion, I just felt like sharing that there are ways to afford network protection to locked down devices.

I’ve got no real care for jellyfin one way or another, just sharing that there’s ways to make the network obey.

I think giving people access to my media server is asking for too much trouble personally. Now you’re dealing with forgotten passwords, people using your bandwidth at weird hours, and you basically become the media fairy, responsible for finding whatever it is people want, and then dealing with their issues when their device can’t codec at it for whatever janky reason.

I’m good at setting boundaries with family so it’s not stressful, just more annoying than I want to deal with.

Depending on their router and how much IT labor you care to do for these people you can actually configure a site to site VPN tunnel. All traffic for a particular address range will get routed through the VPN automatically.

It used to be a high end feature but it’s made it’s way into general routers since it doesn’t really require many resources and it lets you label it as having more home office features.