methodicalaspect

Linux Mint. If my 85-year-old dad can get used to it after over 30 years of Windows, you’ll be fine.

/edit Also Firefox comes with pretty much every Linux distribution, but if you need something Chromium-based, I’m partial to Vivaldi.

…which, in and of itself, is sad as hell because one of the course requirements (at least when I was working on my CS degree) was Operating System Concepts & Design.

…and a lot of them hate the end-user, too. Why must we involve people in the whole computer thing? Isn’t an abacus and a box of crayons enough?

Proxmox 9 dropped too, their major releases coincide with Debian’s. Upgrade process on a single standalone box was completely uneventful; I’ll be trying a 9-node cluster on Monday.

Exactly the correct approach. Similar thing happened to one of my friends a couple years back with Nord. This sort of “leak” could happen with any other VPN provider; not binding the interface is just rolling the dice.

My son, 14, is on Bazzite now after using Pop!_OS for 5 years. He specifically requested it after using it at my office and seeing how well the Logitech steering wheel he uses works in Forza Horizon 5. He’s decent with tech, to the point that his teachers called on him to help with their problems during middle school, so maybe not the best example.

My daughter, 11, is on Pop!_OS. She’s currently at the tech level you describe, though sometimes she forgets to turn the power strip on, making me think she may be slightly below that. Her PC has been on that distro for a good 2 years, though she really only plays Minecraft, watches YouTube videos, and does her homework with OnlyOffice. Zero tech-related complaints from her, once she’s logged in she’s able to do what she needs with little to no assistance.

After stints in EndeavourOS and AlmaLinux I’ve settled on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. I needed something stable with zfs in its official repo, so I don’t risk losing access to the big volume that contains all my raw video footage after a kernel update. The experience has been about as unremarkable as possible, which is exactly what I was looking for.

All three of us are using nvidia GPUs, and have had no trouble with drivers in the slightest. I use mine for gaming and video editing using DaVinci Resolve Studio, and while I was looking for as unremarkable an experience as possible, I’ve been using Linux since around 1996, so my tech experience doesn’t align with what you’re looking for; however, if this means anything, I’d switch my 85-year-old father with dementia to Linux Mint without worrying that he wouldn’t know his way around.

With UHC, this is not unrealistic in the slightest.

I had a follow-up appointment with a specialist I’ve been seeing last Friday. My lab results didn’t show the progress we were expecting, so we decided to attack the issue with a particular medication. This medication is injectable, not a pill like the ones I’ve been taking that have proven to be ineffective, and it’s sold under three names; we discussed all three, and before I left the office, he submitted the prior authorization request.

Given that I’m insured by UHC, the prior authorization was denied. Not only was it denied, they robo-called me to say so, sent a letter via mail, and put a copy of the letter in PDF form on my account, before I got home from the doctor’s office.

Not only that, but the section of the letter where they’re supposed to recommend alternate drugs was blank. So basically, “we’re not going to cover that, you can keep suffering, go fuck yourself” in less than 15 minutes.

UHC is exceedingly efficient at not giving a shit.

Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.

I had to stop calling it reefer when I started dealing with shipping containers, though a 40-foot blunt would be hilarious.

Cosmic - both the GNOME extension and Epoch 1 - is my favorite tiling DE. It just makes the most sense to me, in a way that no other tiling environment has.

If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.

Is it possible to run what you need in a VM? That’s how I’ve been running things that need Windows to function correctly and it hasn’t broken yet. Can even get 11 working with an emulated TPM, including Windows Subsystem for Linux inside the VM if you’re feeling particularly bored.

…no, I don’t want to put all my stuff in OneDrive. No, my settings shouldn’t sync across everything. No, I don’t want to log in with the same account on all devices. I already have email and do not want to use outlook.com thanks. Stop warning me that I did not agree to put all my stuff in OneDrive, it’s really not necessary. What do you mean I can’t change my wallpaper unless I activate? Are you telling me that your antimalware solution that comes bundled in the OS isn’t able to block malicious ads in the browser that also comes with the OS? Why do these applications that I never installed keep showing up in the Start menu? What’s up with all these calls to Azure-based websites in my Pi-Hole logs when I’m away from my desk? Why are my CPUs going at full blast when I’m just staring at the desktop?

I thought NixOS was the new “btw” distro.

Wrex.

I should go.

Get out of here Javik, you’re drunk

I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).

I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.

Not entirely sure why this reply is being panned (was at -6 when I first saw it).

OP is in the process of upgrading their PC to a Ryzen 9. If we make the assumption that this Ryzen 9 is on the AM5 platform, the CPU comes equipped with an IGPU, meaning the RTX 3060s are no longer needed by the bare metal. So, installing a stable, minimal point release OS as a base would minimize resource utilization on the hardware side. This could be something like Debian Bookworm or Proxmox VE with the no-subscription repo enabled. There’s no need for the NVIDIA GPUs to be supported by the bare metal OS.

Once the base OS is installed, the VMs can be created, and the GPUs and peripherals can be passed through. This step effectively removes the devices from the host OS – they don’t show up in lsusb or lspci anymore – and “gives” them to the VMs when they start. You get pretty close to native performance with setups of this nature, to the point that users have set up Windows 10/11 VMs in this way to play Cyberpunk 2077 on RTX 4090s with all the eye candy, including ray reconstruction.

Downsides:

• Three operating systems to maintain: bare metal, yours, and your partner’s.
• Two sets of applications/games to maintain: yours and your partner’s.
• May need to edit VM configs somewhat regularly to stay ahead of anti-cheat measures targeted at users of VMs.
• Performance is not identical to bare metal, but is pretty close.
• VM storage is isolated, so file sharing requires additional setup.

Upsides:

• If you don’t know a lot about Linux, you’ll know a bunch more when you’re done with this.
• Once you get the setup ironed out, it won’t need to change much going forward.
• Each VM’s memory space is isolated, so applications won’t “step on each other” – that is, you can both run the same application or game simultaneously.
• Each user can run their own distro, or even their own OS if they wish. You can run Fedora and your partner can run Mint, or even Windows if they really, really want to. This includes Windows 11 as you can pass an emulated TPM through to meet the hardware requirements.
• Host OS can be managed via web interface (cockpit + cockpit-machines) or GUI application (virt-manager).

It’s not exactly what OP is looking for, but it’s definitely a valid approach to solving the problem.

I’ve been waiting for a beta of the Debian-based version. The Ubuntu-based version seemed to run reasonably well on my old Thinkpad T460, but I didn’t try too much serious stuff on it that I don’t already do on regular Debian with Distrobox.