“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
Not great. I even got GPU passthrough working once, but you get weird graphics glitches because it’s all being sent over RDP.
I think Cassowary might be better than WinApps, but honestly, at this point, I just gave up on those and just use the VM directly.
When it freeze, after you’ve rebooted it, try running sudo journalctl -p 5 -b -1; you might see something in those logs.
Maybe also open a task manager before you do anything graphics intensive, just to see if there’s a process that rapidly increases its memory usage; while it might not be the cause, I’ve experienced similar freezes when I use all my memory (on a machine with 32GB of RAM).
FYI Don’t use this command. I think it was intended as a joke, but I just want to clarify.
Fun fact: you didn’t have to reinstall; you can actually boot up a live usb and chroot into your install to fix things.
That is kind of awesome.
I wish Debian’s default Grub theme was less ugly; I know I could change it (and I have on other installs, but I’m quite lazy about theming these days. Part of it is I have a laptop that I rely on for college and don’t want to risk any theme glitches, so I keep its Debian install as vanilla as possible.
May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).
Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.
Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.
Honestly, even those don’t run that horrid for me when I have to use them.
Debian Stable. Get it installed, get everything working right and configured the way this person likes it on a reasonable DE with default themes, and more likely than not, you won’t have to touch this thing for years.
The setup’s not necessarily for noobs, but if you’re the one doing the setup, you should be able to get it into a place where it will pretty much never break for them.
You should probably give them KDE or GNOME (probably KDE, as it’s more Windows-like and less my way or the highway than Gnome). As much as I love XFCE, it’s probably a good idea to give a layman a feature-heavy DE so that nothing is likely to be missing; also, it’s way too easy to accidentally delete panel items or entire panels on accident and a little annoying to restore things back to the way they were. KDE’s panels implementation mitigates these issues.
I remember my 1st Surface Go’s microSD card reader being pretty good.
As said by @iii@mander.xyz, bog standard Debian Stable.
You really don’t want a rolling release distro for something like this - major software updates might change the behavior of your software, break your configs, etcetera. Stable distros do as much as they can to make sure that software behaves the same, only porting security fixes.
This way, you don’t really have to touch it except for updates with a nearly nonexistent chance of going wrong (and there’s stuff like unattended-upgrades so updates are automatic) and major upgrades.
You can go several years without a major upgrade just fine - Debian versions are supported for 5 years, and we’re only a few days from getting Trixie, which will last into 2030. New versions come out every two years, and it’s not that hard to upgrade between consecutive ones; I don’t think sitting down on a weekend every two years is that bad.
I kind of hate Ubuntu, but it’s pretty based in this case due to really long support. This might be a really great case for Rocky Linux though, as it also gets 10 years support.
On a more serious note, as others have said, you’ll probably burn through these weird storage limitations quickly.
Also, what do you mean by “sensitive matters” on Mint? Because almost any way you spin it, I feel like it’s not a great idea:
Also, as I said in another comment here, please upgrade that drive before you put a lot of data on it. If you don’t and you run out of storage later (a near-certainty on 256GB), you’ll have to go through the effort of getting everything copied, which may include equipment purchases and several hours of your time when you could jut do it right now while your important files are still small enough to fit on a flash drive right now. Save yourself the future trouble.
Anyhow, I wish you happy Linux usage.
Assuming she hasn’t bought it yet, please research that Yoga first. It might work fine, but it could also end up being a miserable experience.
You can check https://linux-hardware.org/ for the model or a similar one.
No, I mean TinyCore literally would run out of RAM during boot. 
Like others have said, Debian probably isn’t a bad idea.
I feel like it would be kind of stupid to run a full-on desktop environment even though technically possible, though - I think this is a good use for IceWM.
Also, at worst, you might have a really low power server.
I think less than 64MB is difficult these days - a few years ago, I was backing up a laptop with 48MB of RAM, and to get a minimal Linux terminal running on it, I had to create a custom Buildroot image and throw it on a CD. TinyCore was too much for it.
A more apt comparison would be using the Windows guest to remote into the Linux host via xorg piping, waypipe, VNC, RDP, etcetera, which conveys your feeling of weirdness while being a closer approximation of what this really does.
It’ll definitely be a difficult undertaking, but I plan on really trying to have a 5.25” bay when I build another PC.
That probably won’t be for a couple more years, though. I’m on a Ryzen 5 2600 and RX 580, and I really don’t do that much intense gaming; a GPU upgrade is tempting so I can actually use ROCm for some casual Blender Cycles renders, though. I hope that the already dismal supply of those 5.25 cases doesn’t dwindle even more.
Besides the corrections others have said, I really can’t think of any reason people would intentionally use legacy BIOS on a machine with UEFI for a new install.
Like, I could get doing it for an old install - I know someone who installed Windows 7 in 2015 on their then-new desktop build and later upgraded to 10 but is stuck on legacy BIOS for now with that machine because 7 only ran on that.
I could see something similarly jank happening to someone in the Linux world and then decide not to address it for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it reasons”, but certainly not for no reason.
I just ripped the Blu-Ray drive from my father’s PC since he wasn’t using it.
Since my machine doesn’t have 5.25” bays, I just have SATA cables dangling out the side of the case. I’ve probably ripped more CDs than Blu-Rays, though.
At this point, I’d wonder if some of the older Microsoft Surfaces might be suitable for this purpose. Especially if it’s just displaying photos, you probably wouldn’t even need the Linux-Surface kernel for a lot of things and could just run mainline, avoiding a lot of misery. For instance, a 1st gen Surface Go from 2018 seems to run for ~$70 on eBay these days; I own one and used to daily-drive it on both Windows and Linux, and although there were some annoyances, the display is decent.
Though honestly, I wonder if you particularly need a Linux tablet at all. There are dedicated digital frame devices out there for displaying photos; a lot of them can just display off a USB drive or SD card in the ballpark of 50 bucks it looks like. I’d probably recommend not getting one that supports Wi-Fi, as I think it’s probably a stupid idea to assume some random cheap device you bought online has correctly-implemented network security.