I already did some searching and found that games can be played offline fine (most of them, some exceptions are there like Multiplayer and Mortal Kombat)

Yes, most games will work offline just fine even with a multiplayer mode. (You just won’t be able to access multiplayer.) I believe you can still play Mortal Kombat 11 offline but it locks you out of a lot of content IIRC.

There is something like the paid Nintendo Online Account. I am not planning on having a paid account. How much of the system depends on the account?

The account creation is completely free. You can even make a local account but you won’t be able to play games online or use the eshop without making a Nintendo account. The only thing you “need” to pay for is a $20 annual Nintendo Switch Online subscription to play your games online. (Note that all games don’t require the Nintendo Switch Online subscription, but most do. This includes all of Nintendo’s first party IP’s.)

Can I have progression in a game (let’s say: one of the Zelda franchise) and will my Wife and Kids all have their own progression, without having to pay for X accounts?

All of your games will have separate saves with different profiles. Note that all of the accounts you make don’t need a Nintendo Account, so you can make a Nintendo Account for yourself (which is free) if you want the features it comes with, and local accounts for your wife and kids, and any game they play will have different saves that won’t conflict with your saves. The only exception to this that I know of is Animal Crossing New Horizons. You can have different accounts and players on one Switch but you are limited to only one island per console.

People who own a Switch, let’s take this to extremes, do you feel like in 20 years from now you can still do the same things on your hardware as you can do now? (No multiplayer is fine)

Personally, I’m not sure how long the Switch’s hardware will last. If the durability and longevity of Nintendo’s other consoles are anything to go by, I’d say it has a fair shot of lasting a while; with the exception of maybe a battery replacement and/or new thermal paste. I have both the OG model and an OLED model, and I can say for certain that the OLED model runs cooler and quieter than my OG model. Even if the Switch’s hardware fails I will always have my games and saves backed up on my PC so I can always play my games through an emulator on more powerful hardware.

Edit: I completely forgot to mention joycons. I think these will be the first things that get replaced with any amount of long-term use. I’ve already gone through 4 pairs on my OG switch because of joycon drift. My OLED is holding up fine though (thankfully), but I think the cheaper option would be to just replace the joycon’s thumb-sticks with hall-sense sticks, and they should (in theory) last quite a bit longer.

I did end up realizing they might not live in a country that cares about piracy, and should have mentioned they might not even need a VPN. Thanks for the correction.

#1. (RTFM) Read the Megathread, it has all the trusted sites you’ll likely need unless you’re getting into to very niche things.

#2. Use a VPN. Mullvad is great but they recently removed port-forwarding so if you care about port-forwarding I recommend going with something like ProtonVPN (paid).

#3. Bind your VPN to your torrent client. (I recommend using QBittorrent)

#4. Also, for music, I recommend you look into soulseek.

Edit: Read @GrievingWidow420@feddit.it’s reply to this comment. They give helpful information that I completely spaced to add into my original comment.

This really grinds my gears. Every company is always complaining about piracy, just to add invasive DRM and/or crappy measures that only ever hurt the consumer.

Some might not act like this is a big deal because those codes typically come with a physical disc, but when you bought the disc you actually bought TWO copies, the physical disc AND the digital code.

What if you sold your code to someone else? GONE. What if you sold your disc? GONE.

This should be illegal but unfortunately they can update their crappy EULA’s that say something along the lines of “By using our service you agree to–”, and there goes your media that you “own forever”.

What a joke.