No it’s the name of the mascot

As others said Ubuntu got kinda scummy. I always send people that are new or have decision paralysis here

You are right. I assumed they wouldn’t test a new DE in an LTS version, but they, in fact, do that.

Yes but he didn’t choose that.

You can realistically use whatever you want. But if you want a stable out of the box experience, choosing an OS that is in a beta testing phase of a new desktop environment, might lead to a less than optimal experience.

If you’d be fine with having a docker container running, have a look at Signature PDF.

I’ve been using it to manipulate pdfs in similar ways you described and put it on a pi in my homenetwork (autostarting docker would also work).

They have a tester here.

(Also: french open source project)

As a former distro hopper: i just partitioned my drives with /, /home and /opt and only replaced the root partition - yes I had a lot of config files that weren’t needed, but one could use scripts to help with that.

Then some scripts to reinstall the programs need and resetup /opt and i was ready to go. For my pis am doing it with ansible.

The way I learned and internalized English, was through programming and a vocabulary trainer/flash cards at around 11 years old. So my advice would be: find something they find interesting and provide them with mostly English resources to learn that interesting thing, while also starting to learn basic vocabulary through flash cards.

I went through the effort to guide some people (mostly my family n≈10) through distrochooser, but in the end most of them chose Linux Mint and two wanted to go with endeavour for gaming, but I installed base arch on it and we designed their basic workflows together. For now everyone is happy.

True, but i had similar problems in the past. I had 32GB RAM and when suspending it took years to boot and one day it didn’t boot at all. A second hard drive with 50GB swap solved that problem for me.

Are you using swap? If yes how much? It is recommended to use 1.5x your installed RAM if you want to use hibernation or suspension.

Here is some reasoning from redhat.

Just install her favourite browser, chromium, Firefox, whatever. Set it as default and then create desktop links to her favourite streaming services. How to do that can be found here. You can also change the Icon to the specific logo by downloading it and change the line with ‘icon’ to a file path.

Should look and feel just like a desktop app