American politics genuinely makes me lose braincells, backwards fucking country, MAGA or otherwise

This is akin to MAGA calling the pope marxist cuz he disagrees with them, some people are so one-dimensional its comical, you cant fight stupidity with stupidity, this is how actual fascists justify all of their extremist views, extremism just encourages extremism on the other side and gives those who are indoctrinated a bigger reason to support their indoctrinators. Tunnel vision is one crazy phenomenon 🤡

It’s literally be just as simple as choosing a distro, preferably a just works one or something thats piss easy to install like Linux Mint, Fedora or OpenSuse.

Then you choose your Desktop Environment, from which you can choose either KDE Plasma, XFCE, GNOME or the new COSMIC desktop environment (still currently in beta so not recommended js yet) which you can choose when installing your distro or while choosing your distro. You can always change it once you’ve chosen.

KDE Plasma’s infinitely customisable, yet also really user friendly, with a lot of incredible software included by default, including phone compatibility software similar to what you’ll find in apple’s ecosystem. XFCE’s really lightweight and power efficient. GNOME’s very macOS like by default, being a lot less customisable than KDE but really user friendly. They each have their own versions of software.

You should know what your distro’s package manager is and how to use it, which is basically what you use to install updates and install and uninstall software. That’s literally the only thing you’ll need to use your terminal for, it’s basically just a text based file manager which can run programs/software. That’s basically it, just make sure to frequently update your system, they are voluntary unlike Windows updates and don’t require reboots or crash your system, and you should be good.

Majority of AAA games run invasive software like kernel-level anticheat, I’d personally recommend js buying him a PS5 or running them in VMs (Linux or windows).

Frameworks are the best modern laptop by far imo.