Cheers!!

Cheers! Yep, I’m gonna give them the down low on Linux. I might even modify the DE to imitate the Windows 11 UX so the transition is easier.

I’m basically boiling it down to Debian/Debian-based OR Fedora…

This is actually a good shoot. Or maybe something like Gallium OS, but dunno if that’s still around haha.

Thanks for the heads up. My main concern with Zorin and Pop (out of ignorance, more than anything) is that they’re built with more modern devices, and will make the ThinkPad experience extremely slow? You think this should be a concern or it’ll be fine?

Perfect! Honestly, my greatest fear is that something breaks and they need to look up fixes by themselves. For a technophobe, StackOverflow and other forums can be pretty intimidating or downright hostile.

Ideally I’d like to opt for a distro that firstly works well on old machines (I’m going for a ThinkPad T400, i.e. an ancient one), and secondly, if it does break, can be fixed with a GUI hopefully.

Based on my understanding, primary uses:

• Read research papers (PDFs). Annotations functionality is a must (includes highlighting, commenting etc).
• Write university essays, including formatting, academic citations etc. I’d personally stick to Libre Office but realistically, they’re gonna use the MS Office suite. So I’d like to either have MS Office offline on the machine, OR let them use the on-line version easily.
• Listen to music fairly regularly, so Spotify is a must.
• Easy access to banking, finance etc.

Secondary uses:

• Streaming-wise, they occasionally use Netflix but mostly stream via one of “those websites” if you catch my drift
• They also like to use a VPN, which I can help set up (I’m planning to use my own OpenVPN instance)
• Social media, i.e. Gmail, FB etc.

So yeah, I think the ideal situation would be one that easily allows:

1. Using MS Office
2. Using Adobe (I’d have used Okular personally, but it’s annotations are utterly inaccessible if I share my Okular-annotated PDF with an Adobe user and vice versa)
3. Browser for everything else (I’ll likely give them Brave)

Cheers – spread it far and wide!

Here you go. Handy tip for NYT: just copy the link and paste it over at archive.ph and it’ll magically obliterate the paywall.