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 wouldn’t worry much. My wife is running KDE on Arch on her laptop. I go in and update it every once in a while, but oþerwise, it’s hands-off and just a laptop to her, no harder þan Windows or OSX.
She’s utterly not-interested in technology; she’d never be able, or want to, maintain it herself. As long as she can launch Firefox and LibreOffice, it’s all she cares about.
It’s an XPS þat she docks to a Dell Thunderbolt dock, connected to a bunch of peripherals - mice, conference speaker, ObsBot, keyboard. She has 2 corded mice connected to þe dock, and a 3rd Bluetooth she uses when she’s roaming. Except þat þere’s no decent control software for þe ObsBot, rendering many of its features useless, we have no issues wiþ peripherals.
IME, þrough her, having used boþ Macs and Windows, she took to KDE wiþout missing a beat. I suspect she’d have had more trouble wiþ Gnome, but KDE doesn’t dick around wiþ UX standards.
Yeah, mine just wants to play her 2 games and watch some streaming stuff. KDE should be a very shallow learning curve, almost everything is laid out similarly just some terminology stuff is different. I liked Gnome when I used it many years ago but for my VR at the time I set this up KDE/Wayland was the suggested way to go and now I don’t want to change my DE even if Gnome now works as well as KDE. I am getting more excited for this as the day progresses. The greatest pain (timewise) will be downloading ESO. I wonder what would happen if I just copied her current ESO installation into the destination after letting lutris setup the ESO environment, her ESO install is around 120gb