Tonight I am installing Kubuntu on the gfs machine. Once she is comfortable with that, and the support ends for our version prolly going with Debian. Going to remove her windows drive (256 or 512GB) as there is only 1 m.2 port on the board, and replace it with a 1tb.
Her needs are simple, make Logitec G13 work (works and tested on my machine for months), Make ESO and addons work (Lutris has its own installer for ESO YAY! Minion has a linux version.), and minecraft java (found in app manager).
Now, she has some knock off razor mouse with buttons under the thumb, maybe the razorx software or whatever it’s called will work on her mouse?, this may be a slight pain point. I am hoping this will work out and she will be happy with her (new) pc, we are preserving her windows as a fall back if she hates it. I have a short video lined up to teach her the linux file system. She won’t be doing anything command line, for now, except to start the G13. Gonna leave her with the dolphin file manager as it is difficult to get elevated privileges compared to nautalis(sp?) where it is a simple checkbox click. Anything else to suggest here?
I can mostly teach her what she needs to know as we go, she is a smart cookie and has picked up everything I taught her for windows and networking so far so should not be an issue for her, but if you guys have any suggestions on tutorial vids for non power users or other things I can do to make this even more seamless it would be appreciated.
Edit: Thank you all for your input, very much appreciated. I will keep monitoring for new posts
I could never get any of my friends on Linux (maybe I’ll be able to now that Windows 10 is dying) but I was able to get everyone on prism instantly because it’s just a better launcher than the official one in every possible way (it’s also on Windows and MacOS)
unless they need kernel level anticheat, the rest should work. just demonstrate how well your system runs these apps and that should help. just be ready to be their on-call tech hehe
That’s the thing though. If I’m going to need to be on-call tech support then Linux isn’t actually a better option then Windows. Sure it would be more private and less sucky but if the computer doesn’t actually work then that doesn’t mean anything. I’m willing to make ad-hoc workarounds to my own problems because I’m a software developer and don’t mind falling down a rabbit hole to get something like push-to-talk working with a custom pipewire script. My friends who want to play games and relax when they get home from work are understandably not willing to go through that hassle.
I’d love for Linux to be ready for daily driving but for most people I know it just isn’t. Maybe when Wayland desktops are more mature but I’m not going to make people choose between functioning shortcuts (X11) and functioning monitors (Wayland).