I think the biggest fundamental concept for any computer regardless of operating system is filesystem hierarchy. The concept of nested folders is core to using a personal computer, but for the last two decades UI/X teams have done everything in their power to obscure and abstract it away. Many younger people conceptualize the storage on their device as just an amorphous blob that apps manage autonomously. Windows is starting to go this way as well with OneDrive being sold as the way to manage all your data, but on Linux the file system is still king.

Your mom is presumably old enough to have some experience with desktop PCs, so hopefully that basic hurdle is already cleared. And honestly once someone is at that level of base competence, along with basic interface concepts like how to use a mouse and keyboard, clicking on icons, use of a web browser etc, with the right distro you really don’t need to explain much else. There might be a few quirks of the UI to explain depending on what you choose, but most of that can be handled by just watching them use the computer for a bit, and/or asking them to give you a list of questions and annoyances after they use it for a few days.

The biggest difference is one that most “I just want it to work” users will actually love, and that’s relearning how to install software. Having one central location to install verified software from is a change from the wild west of downloading installers from the internet, but it shouldn’t be a difficult transition. Most people these days don’t even install software beyond maybe Zoom, so you can probably get away with just installing any third party software they need in the initial setup.

I recommend an immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue, at least if a) you’re setting it up and are reasonably technical, and b) you don’t want to go over and help them fix stuff often. I set my mom’s laptop up with it 4+ years ago and she’s only had one problem since then.

They’re both mature software packages with a ton of features. There are two gigantic obligations that a browser & especially web engine have that creative software don’t: massive security exposure and constantly changing web standards. Both create development burdens that are both non-trivial and time-sensitive. Many FOSS projects update at their own pace, which is simply not an option for a modern, feature-complete web engine.

You are severely underestimating the development burden of a modern web engine.

You must have changed an option, by default the page shows up every time you open a new tab. (Though you can disable the ads on it)

You can disable them, but also I’m pretty sure the default behavior is just to fill extra space if you have less than 8 pinned shortcuts. Your single shortcut is why there are so many ads.

Yes. I’m pretty sure you can disable sponsored suggestions in the options, or you can also just delete the individual sponsored options. I’ve not seen one of these in the last 4 years.

Is it non-trivial to enable non-free repos?

You are agreeing with the person you replied to lol

Well anecdotally many of us have the opposite experience so I guess sucks to be you?

What might have happened: if you select a global compatibility tool (proton) in the steam settings, it will use that for all non-native games. But any games that ship a Linux binary will still use that instead of Proton. This is generally good, but some devs ship a Linux binary that’s actually not as good as the Windows one. I’ve seen some games not update the Linux binary until much later than the Windows one, so the Linux one is out of date, and for some games it’s just flat-out broken. In these cases you can manually select a Proton version for that game, which will force it to run the Windows binary.

You seem to be reaching for pretty advanced solutions – Docker and HA both require you to read a lot of documentation to get started. Bottles is also a powerful and flexible tool, which is the opposite of simple.

What game are you trying to run? If it’s on Steam it should be a no-brainer, otherwise Lutris can simplify a lot of things.

I doubt you actually need Docker for anything, unless you have a specific use case I would just abandon that. For your lights, I would try searching for “home assistant [model/brand of lights]” and see if you can find a setup that someone else has gotten working that you can mostly copy.

You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don’t have the disposable income to easily afford it.

Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren’t depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that’s only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam…

Also, in many cases it’s actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that’s probably taking a cut.

I think so – gamers these days complain about having 50 ping or less than 120fps. There’s certainly a point at which it seriously impacts your gameplay, but I find it laughable when they can’t even deal with better performance than even existed 15 years ago.

Organize by building stronger and more resilient communities. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing as an anarchist anyway.

You can game on just about any distro – I’m using NixOS and it’s great for many reasons, but also can be a real pain to learn and to solve new problems.

But if you’re looking for the easiest to set up that will be most likely to just work and gaming is a priority, go for Bazzite.

I will second Fedora and Debian as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)

SteamOS works great for the steam deck, there really aren’t any extra features that I can think of that are useful from bazzite. Updates happen often enough… There’s just not really any reason to go through the effort of changing to bazzite and reinstalling everything, but I guess it shouldn’t hurt either.

It’s not always preferable to be constantly updating to the most bleeding edge available… On the contrary, for something like a handheld gaming device I think stability is a bigger priority. Most of the updates that might, for example, make a game start working better, will be from Proton anyway, and your choice of OS makes no difference to how fast you get those, they’re either from Steam or the ProtonUp app, which will get you the latest custom versions from GloriousEggroll.

There’s a big overhaul update that got teased after over a year of radio silence, fingers crossed that it comes out soon!

In my experience it either works or it doesn’t, based on whether the devs have blocked it or not. The only extra step I’ve needed to do for anti-cheat on Steam games is installing a Proton runtime for the given anti-cheat, which are just in the tools section.

The vast majority of dotfiles can be split into multiple documents. If you want to share but also put sensitive/personal information in some of them, just part the personal bits out into separate documents and maybe give them all an easy to filter suffix/prefix. Then just only publicly share the other files.

Hmmm okay I understand. There might well be a dedicated program for this, but I’m also sure it’s technically possible, just maybe far from trivial.

A bit of searching turned up this, I haven’t tried it myself but it claims to offer the functionality you want: https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxjoymap/