linuxmemes

Wonder if they are thin clients. I remember setting up some Dell thin and zero clients using Windows for a state college in Florida a few years back. 2019 I think. Everything being forced into OneDrive storage for their personal files, but it made it so they could sit down at any desk, and pull the computer up out of the desk and login and have their crap while it all being very locked down/managed.

Did she ever "learn" Windows?

I've been using Windows since 95 and I can't find shit in Windows.

Linux gaming is in a great place right now, thanks to proton framework developed by valve. Anything on steam will pretty much just work with no tweaks at all necessary, and if you need proprietary launchers for your games (blizz, epic, etc.) then lutris handles that.

The only games which won’t work well without some kind of mods are those with the anti cheat root kits…apex namely. Thankfully those are few and far between but you could get unlucky depending on what games you’re maining.

Bazzite is a distro you should consider because it’s made specifically for gaming and comes with some nice optimizations already baked in, but Mint will work fine if you really want something that looks and feels like windows. Either way, try out Linux, you won’t regret!

If you have specific games you play on steam you can look them up on Protondb and see community data on how well they work.

Mint main here, and I'll say outright: most distros are good for gaming. Got steam? Then you have an easy install of proton. Got flatpak? You got bottle to help you setup wine configs.

Mint is not setup out of the box for gaming (unlike distros like nobara), but it's still arguably easier to install than windows's exes.

I recommend mint to start getting into Linux. Keep it 4-5 months as daily driver, then you'll be free to try other things. Personally I did some distro hopping, but came back to it as it was just... Good and stable.

... Until you talk about Nvidia. By default, mint uses the nouveau drivers... Which can be hit or miss. There's the driver manager to help you one click install other versions, but you might have to try a few to get it working. If steam games crashes on startup, but not in Nvidia GPU only mode, that might be a bad version. That's not really a mint thing, but it's good to know.

For Mint and gaming specifically, somebody else would probably answer better but I can't imagine it's going to be too different from any other Linux distribution. If my memory serves me right, there are pretty easy to use utilities to install Nvidia proprietary drivers (which can often be the painpoint for people, though my experience has luckily been different). That being said, I do know a lot of people tend to advise Bazzite for gaming, so again, maybe someone more knowledgeable there could chime in.

For the more general question of gaming on Linux (irrelevant of the distribution), Steam has made things really easy for a lot of games. I have switched to Linux about 15 years ago and I can tell you it used to be a pita, but now with Proton, a lot of games "just work" TM. Unfortunately, some games do remain unplayable, in particular some multiplayer games which require kernel level anti cheats. You should check beforehand for the games you are interested in, but if something is truly unsupported that you want to play, Mint or no Mint, you're shit out of luck.

My advice would be, if you have time for that, to back up your data (which you do anyways right?) and just give Mint a spin. You won't brick your computer, worst case there is a showstopper and you can just reinstall windows. I am sure plenty of folks online would be happy to help in the process ;)

there is such a thing as Postmarket OS. Don't know how well it flies, but it's a linux for smartphones

To be fair, the computers here are older than chromeos

Might just be a US thing, it's all I've seen in schools here (for daily use I mean, I did see a 3d modeling class using Windows desktops though)

I miss when Apple was fun. It's been a very long time. I dragged some more time out of it with Hackintoshing, but that's done now.

Exactly this (except I prefer macOS over Linux out of habit). If you're a power user that's comfortable working from a terminal, macOS is really just a polished UNIX system. There are no guard rails that sudo !! won't get you past.