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.

I’ve only used an LLM (you can guess which one) once to write code. Mostly because I didn’t feel like writing down some numbers and making a little drawing for myself to solve the problem.

And because a friend insisted that it writes code just fine.

But it didn’t. It confidently didn’t. Instead, it made up something weird and kept telling me that it had now “fixed” the problem, when in reality it was trying random fixes that were related to the error message but had nothing to do with the actual core problem. It just guessed and prayed.

In the end, I solved the problem in 10 minutes with a small scribble and a pen. And most of the time was spend drawing small boxes, because my solution relied on a coordinate system, I needed to visualize.