Make sure it has at least a few inches of clearance at the back. Also many cases/PSUs have fans on the bottom, if yours does then raising it up on some feet can really help.

Try multiplying or raising to a power. Addition works too but is slower.

Team vim, but I’ve been using Helix instead for a year or two – it’s like if Neovim and Kakoune had a baby.

Any games that you can just run on Steam without issue will work fine, it’s when you have to start passing launch commands etc that things become more complicated. Most things are still possible but harder because you have to deal with the very unusual way Nixos stores its files. The specific thing that made me give up and go to CachyOS was trying to get gamescope working under wayland for Steam games – every way I tried, I was having to compromise on what I actually wanted. Also VR has been easier to play with, though it’s still far from Windows parity.

I mix, my server and laptop are nixos but I use an arch variant on my desktop. Mostly I do this because of various pain points with nixos and gaming.

Well that seems like a fairly big deal.

Wow no one’s said emacs yet

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Have you ever used Linux?

You seem very misinformed so I’m just providing you with resources.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

Getting hung up on feature parity with Windows and Mac is both a waste of time and literally impossible given the major differences between those two UIs. KDE already does most of that legwork anyway, and you can disable middle click paste easily.

IMO your time would be best spent making GUI tooling that doesn’t already exist. Identify a pain point for you that forces you to the terminal and start there.

On many distros it is.

Lol I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant that gamescope would be difficult to get working under Bazzite’s immutable architecture.

You do realize gamescope is just a package you can install, right? Do you think it’s a unique feature of SteamOS or what?

There’s really no reason to use it on a general purpose desktop. It’s designed to basically make a PC into a console. You do still have full access to the (mostly) normal Linux system behind it, but it’s not something I’d use unless I was setting it up for someone who didn’t want to deal with any of the behind the scenes stuff.

CachyOS, Nobara, and Bazzite all should get you the same level of gaming support with more flexibility as a normal OS, and they can all run Steam Big Picture which is basically the SteamOS UI.

You know it’s explicitly not “free as in beer” right?

I think the biggest fundamental concept for any computer regardless of operating system is filesystem hierarchy. The concept of nested folders is core to using a personal computer, but for the last two decades UI/X teams have done everything in their power to obscure and abstract it away. Many younger people conceptualize the storage on their device as just an amorphous blob that apps manage autonomously. Windows is starting to go this way as well with OneDrive being sold as the way to manage all your data, but on Linux the file system is still king.

Your mom is presumably old enough to have some experience with desktop PCs, so hopefully that basic hurdle is already cleared. And honestly once someone is at that level of base competence, along with basic interface concepts like how to use a mouse and keyboard, clicking on icons, use of a web browser etc, with the right distro you really don’t need to explain much else. There might be a few quirks of the UI to explain depending on what you choose, but most of that can be handled by just watching them use the computer for a bit, and/or asking them to give you a list of questions and annoyances after they use it for a few days.

The biggest difference is one that most “I just want it to work” users will actually love, and that’s relearning how to install software. Having one central location to install verified software from is a change from the wild west of downloading installers from the internet, but it shouldn’t be a difficult transition. Most people these days don’t even install software beyond maybe Zoom, so you can probably get away with just installing any third party software they need in the initial setup.

I recommend an immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue, at least if a) you’re setting it up and are reasonably technical, and b) you don’t want to go over and help them fix stuff often. I set my mom’s laptop up with it 4+ years ago and she’s only had one problem since then.

Is it non-trivial to enable non-free repos?

Well anecdotally many of us have the opposite experience so I guess sucks to be you?

What might have happened: if you select a global compatibility tool (proton) in the steam settings, it will use that for all non-native games. But any games that ship a Linux binary will still use that instead of Proton. This is generally good, but some devs ship a Linux binary that’s actually not as good as the Windows one. I’ve seen some games not update the Linux binary until much later than the Windows one, so the Linux one is out of date, and for some games it’s just flat-out broken. In these cases you can manually select a Proton version for that game, which will force it to run the Windows binary.