My guess is that if most things “just work”, Linux may be fine. I mean, there’s a whole second laptop available and I’m reachable most of the time. I just don’t want to play support all the time.

I’m also not that worried about locking things down. The parents can’t even lock down Windows properly and have resorted to restricting internet time via a router setting. It’s MAC based, and I think if the kid figures out how to change MAC addresses, they deserve a little extra Roblox time until the parents notice.

At the moment I think I’ll sit down with them and we’ll set this thing up together. That way I can teach them a bit about the differences and show them cool things like ad blocking or Steam and see how they do by themselves … and then make my (hopefully final) decision.

I would just like to say that I really appreciate everyone’s contributions so far; even the little off-topic discussions.

But you are completely misjudging the situation. When I spoke of “first assumption”, said they "know their way around Windows" and stated they found ways around prior parental locks, I was actually referring to the fact that “my kid” hasn’t even been born yet. We’ve just slipped two iPads in, one with a YouTube-Kids Elsa Gate loop and the other constantly doom scrolling TikTok and Twitter.

I’m definitely not talking about someone who is a several years older than I was, when I got my first internet connected PC.

Sarcasm aside; they are more than old enough, according to their actual parents. They had a phone for quite some time; same for a Windows notebook. I just happen to have a better notebook laying around, but feel like Windows is sort of shit, and I need a little help with judging if Linux is the right call.

Just want to add to the difference in experience:

I leaned Linux, because I wanted to learn Linux and as such I was fine with stumbling a bit from time to time. They want a working computer that does Roblox and homework and don’t care much about the rest.

I daily drive Silverblue (and the terminal is not useless >:c), and in a vacuum I would probably install Silverblue or another atomic desktop. But I worry about Windows compatibility.

Imagine the feeling when “you just click the .exe and everything installs itself” works for everyone but you. It doesn’t matter that downloading executables from random websites is way worse than a proper package manager in pretty much every way.

It’s still alienating. Going along with everyones technical dept may still be a nicer experience, because at least it doesn’t require the effort of doing something different.

That’s what I’m worried about.

Is the image edited? 75% sRGB coverage on an IPS panel? That’s terrible. I’ve never seen IPS panels that cover so little sRGB colorspace. Almost all of them will easily achieve the same amount of Adobe RGB per default.

75% is horrendous. You’ll definitely notice that.

Half-Life Alyx looks fantastic. It’s a modern but faithful representation of the Half-Life universe. You can jump from HL2 to Alyx and feel like you’re part of the same narrative and story. Even though there are almost two decades in between.

Half-Life RTX has more polygons, higher-resolution textures and a much more resource-hungry lighting system. The entire Half-Life universe was cast as a cameo to star in another guys remake.

Man. Last time I just wanted to check if my new laptop was working properly, so I booted up it’s preinstalled Windows. I literally had to look up how to get Windows to get me into Explorer without creating an account or connecting it to my network.

It took me about 25 minutes and Windows was already installed on the damn thing.

It took 15 minutes from booting a prepared Fedora stick to logging in.

I honestly believe that, by now, Linux is no more difficult than Windows. People are just not used to the differences.

What is the point of paying for the pipe if you don’t use everything you can?! There is no reason they shouldn’t push it through faster.

This is the reason why I leave the shower running in every hotel I visit. And at the buffet, I tell the waiter to fetch me a trash can so I can actually get rid of the whole thing. If I can, I usually leave both a heater and an air conditioner running in the hallway.

Edit: Wow. I had completely forgotten about this comment. I really didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. I work with networks. I know we’re not literally going to run out of internet. But everyone treats bandwidth as this freely available resource. Advertisers, consumers, creatives and Jürgen. Fuck you, Jürgen. We both know that downloading 6 fucking MB every time someone wants to queue up the database is fucking insane, as is your reliance on client-side bullshit.

Anyway, whenever a anything loads slowly, think about why. Bandwith is not free. It’s a maintained resource.

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[…] more than 60 Hz. Most phones on the market don’t even support it.

Just checked. Most phones within the 400€ - 800€ price range support more than 60Hz.

Of 591 devices, only 176 feature a ‘unknown’ or <90Hz refresh rate. 415 support >=90Hz, 382 support >=120Hz and 48 models go to >=144Hz. It has become a fairly common feature.

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it even has a tutor

Yeah, people are just lazy. I remember when I invented a new login screen and was told it was “difficult”, “confusing” and “took some getting used to”.

It even came with a free 100-page manual and a 4-hour master class. Some people, I tell you!

^This is meant more as a joke than an actual critique, even if it kind of reflects my thoughts. But ultimatly, I thought it was a funny bit.^