Yeah, I’ve considered VR for a long while, but between the already existing headaches, and the Linux related headaches I’ve heard of, I’ll just wait until I’m retired for VR space games, VR racing, and VR porn. Hopefully it’ll get better before I’m dead.

Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.

This is entirely plausible, but I don’t know if it’s there yet. I’ve long since moved to AMD GPUs so I can’t really fiddle and find out. Give the open source drivers some time to mature.

Until then, you are reasonably safe running Linux with secure boot turned off. I’m no expert on the matter, but I’m not familiar with any ongoing threats to boot loader in Linux distributions. Stick to your official repos to be safest, unverified user maintained sources like AUR and COPR are possibly more likely to harbor security threats, don’t use them if you don’t need to or don’t know what you’re doing. Password your bios and require a password to log in to your operating system. Common sense is a better defense than secure boot.

That’s rough

Many laptops have either discrete or integrated GPUs.

The command inxi -G should list display drivers. If you don’t have inxi installed, sudo dnf install inxi.

Google chrome from rpm fusion non-free repo is fine, google chrome flatpak is fine Google chrome .deb package is fine on mint. There’s no controversy’s about browsers worth basing your distro choice on. Better yet, export her shit to Firefox and tell her she’s using that now.

What kind pf GPU does she have? What drivers are installed? Also, I get that ultramarine is supposed to be “easy fedora” but it’s certainly a lesser used distro, there might be some quirks at play. The ultimate mom dad or grandma distro is Linux Mint, might be worth trying it out to see if it has the same issue or not.

There’s a ton of them on Etsy

Yep. Over here running Fedora KDE 40 on my desktop, dealing with zero issues. My use case is pretty simple, but everything I use just works, no issues.

Love it when people speak with authority and are confidently incorrect. Eugenia is right.

You could potentially use flatseal to grant the flatpak the necessary permissions, and you might find out what those permissions are by looking for other users experiences with the flatpak version.

Or, you find the .deb file and it installs natively without being sandboxed. OR, you can find a PPA repository for it, load said repository and install your software.

But those things require learning a little. Linux rewards self starters who can use a search engine and forums. Hope this maybe points you in the right direction.

I would recommend Linux Mint. Yes it’s faster to update than Debian, but it doesn’t push the envelope nearly as fast as Fedora or Arch based distros.

Linux mint is just super easy, user friendly, you could use Mint without ever touching a terminal if you wanted. BSD would be a great pet project to fiddle with, but if you’re looking for a rock solid backup machine with zero fuss, Mint is perfect for that.

My brother, I have been caught, I didn’t read the last paragraph. Damn. Okay yeah, use EndeavourOS, on a BTRFS file system with timeshift auto snap and grub snapshots. Boom.

My experience with endeavour was much the same, I switched after building a team red system. Endeavour and Arch are wonderful distros, but eventually something breaks if you don’t closely follow release notes. You either gain that level of awareness and competence to fix things yourself, or it breaks and you just wipe and reinstall.

Not a good direction to point a fresh Linux user.

No. I suggested Arch and its variants for years, and I see the error of my ways. Merging pacnew files and resolving issues are well over the head of most newbie users. Arch is a great place to end up, not a place to start.

I recommend Linux mint to start, and Fedora after you’ve learned a bit. Nobara is cool too, but it’s a version behind Fedora, so I don’t use it at the moment. Linux mint is hands down the best place to start your journey.

I’m not quoting an article directly or anything so there’s likely better info out there, but brave browser was built with scammy crypto bro bullshit in it, and it’s CEO, iirc, is kind of an alt-right anti LGBTQ+ general douchebag. I’m sure you could search for more on the topic if DuckDuckGo was working.

I spent my first year of Linux installing a new distro, or same distro with a different DE probably every other week, sometimes more than once in a week. The Linux ecosystem rewards self starters with curiosity and the ability to search for answers.

LearnLinuxTV is an amazing YouTube channel, high quality distro tours and reviews, as well as tutorials at various levels of mastery. ItsFOSS and Phoronix are great sources for Linux news that help you build some awareness and vocabulary. The official forums of almost every distro are extremely helpful places to find solutions to problems. You just kinda have to be motivated to seek out the answers you need as they arise.

That’s one thing I find particularly neat about Fedora, it has all of these software package groups that can be either added on at install, or installed at any time, including:

   3D Printing
   Administration Tools
   Audio Production
   Authoring and Publishing
   Books and Guides
   C Development Tools and Libraries
   Cloud Infrastructure
   Cloud Management Tools
   Container Management
   D Development Tools and Libraries
   Design Suite
   Development Tools
   Domain Membership
   Fedora Eclipse
   Editors
   Educational Software
   Electronic Lab
   Engineering and Scientific
   FreeIPA Server
   Games and Entertainment
   Headless Management
   LibreOffice
   MATE Applications
   MATE Compiz
   Medical Applications
   Milkymist
   Network Servers
   Office/Productivity
   Robotics
   RPM Development Tools
   Security Lab
   Sound and Video
   System Tools
   Text-based Internet
   Window Managers

I got a laptop with a touch screen for a young kid in my family, installed Fedora Workstation with its native Gnome desktop, and touch worked great without any tinkering.

Gnomes workflow is a big departure from windows, but with its gesture navigation on a trackpad, I think it’s a highly superior way to use a laptop. My desktop gets KDE Plasma, but if I had a laptop it would use gnome

I fully expected all replies to miss the point. You can’t make more nuclear power without massive amounts of petroleum based energy and products.

But, again, it doesn’t matter, and isn’t worth arguing about. People don’t get it because why would they want to get it? It sucks to get it.

I don’t hold your hopium against you at all, I would love a positive outcome. I’m not holding my breath though.

Die. We will die. The only crutch that props up our massive jump from 1 billion pre industrialized society to our current 8 billion human beings on this planet, has been cheap and plentiful fossil fuel. Notably, it is the only thing that has allowed us to practice agriculture on a scale that supports our population growth. When it’s gone, there is nothing to replace it, short of a miracle fusion revolution.

The average carbon cost to produce an electric vehicle is about 6 tons on average, not including the battery, about the same as an ICE vehicle. Where does the energy for auto manufacturing come from? Primarily coal and natural gas, with a sliver of insubstantial wind and nuclear power. About 7 barrels of oil go into each and every tire on the road (between expended energy and actual petroleum products in the tire). Charging the battery? Coal, natural gas, and the same trickle of alternative sources mentioned above.

Speaking of those alternative energy sources, what do we use to make them? Building a nuclear power plant is likely the most carbon intensive process ever devised, from the machinery that moves the earth, to the foundry that makes the steel. As much as I’ve always wanted to believe in a cozy eco future, every time I squint a little I can see that it’s all just a coat of green paint over the same old oil field. The people trying to sell you on oil, and the people trying to sell you on alternatives to it, are doing the same thing. Selling you something. That’s all that matters to them.

There is no feasible alternative that changes the outcome. There is no replacement for what has allowed us to create wonders and horrors beyond our ancestors wildest dreams, and sustain a population far beyond anything we could have achieved without fossil fuels. When oil finally becomes unproductive, so will the mechanisms that hold our current civilization together, and we will wind up back in 1810 if we’re lucky, or 400ad if we aren’t.

Call me a doomer and downvote me or whatever. It doesn’t matter.