If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.

They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

Okay I got another stupid question. You have everything going to the rear of the pc, but often times motherboards will have a riser to send audio to the front or top of the case so you can plug your headset in there. Do you have this facility and if so does running to it make any difference?

I may end up having to bow out but if I don’t get to keep trying to help: at some point you’ll need to fire up a daw or obs or jack or something to figure out if you can actually see the signal you’re dealing with anywhere.

The troubleshooting process I’m working through is more akin to what you’d do if you were at a big old mixing console trying to figure out why there’s no sound as opposed to the seemingly more obvious process of tracing device drivers and whatnot.

It’s been very helpful to me when troubleshooting sound issues “in the box”, so if you get stumped fiddlefarting around with lspci and whatnot, give it a shot from that side.

That’s great! What does kmix show?

This is gonna sound stupid, but plug and unplug your jack a few times with sound playing.

What does Kmix show?

E: actually before you check that, do the speakers play sound from the mac when plugged in to it directly?

I didn’t read all that too closely.

Do you have sound coming from the speakers plugged into the pc when you play a sound on the pc?

Some distributions have that. Some have it built into the tools like arch. For some you just boot your installation media and run only the “install bootloader” step.

About the only universal way is to boot usb, pivot-root or chroot to switch to the installed system you wanna run and do grub-install, although you need to understand a few things about your system to not make errors.

Once you pick something to stick with, go ahead and look up its process. Think of it like practicing changing a tire in the grocery store parking lot before you actually need to do it on the side of the road.

No that doesn’t keep windows from changing anything.

Just learn how to repair your bootloader how your distribution wants it done and you’ll be fine.

It doesn’t matter.

You have some good answers and some bad answers here.

It’s not the fault of the people answering, what you’re asking has been piecemeal and scattershot in implementation over the last decade so everyone has some bizarre response they came up with to be happy.

Allow me to share mine: use a kvm switch.

The switch lets you plug two computers into one keyboard, video, and mouse. But you’re gonna just use the video part. Plug it into both your motherboards and gpus video ports and push the button to switch back and forth between the gpu for gaming and the motherboard for everything else.

Why only gaming? Because everything else you reference can make use of a gpu that’s not being used for video. I guess some game engines support rendering frames and then sending them to another output device but that’s not something to rely on.

So when you’re using blender you see the model on your monitor plugged into the motherboard but the heavy lifting is done by the gpu. When you transcode a video the same thing happens.

I came to this solution after trying to do what you’re asking for in x11 and having a bunch of headaches about it everytime an update would come down.

Pushing a little button on the desktop was easier than messing around with software to make a rube Goldberg contraption to do the same thing. Mine had two leds on either side to indicate which “computer” I was using at the time. I ended up wrapping electrical tape around the rim to cover them both up and cut out the word “turbo” from the tape over the green led that indicated I was looking at the gpu.

Yeah wouldn’t it be nice…

But the most considerate thing for the user is to help them use what they want to use. There’s also a real benefit to keeping ahold of that windows because people often have their own ways of doing things and it may be more expedient to boot back into 10 than to figure out how to complete some task in Linux.

I suggested 0patch not to bypass some arbitrary check, for which there are many options, but to provide access to security patches and updates after Microsoft stops publishing them for 10.

Consider 0patch before you give up on windows. They do good work and it’s real affordable.

No matter what you do, in this circumstance it’s worth keeping that windows partition around.

I do think whatever you use is the right choice though.

E: I looked up the 0patch pricing and you get a year of patches for a bunch of eol versions of windows like 7 and 10 for $25 a year. It’s a good deal I think for people who don’t want to or can’t upgrade to 11, and they beat Microsoft to a bunch of zero day exploits.

I know you said it’s a no money kind of situation but I really think when ten is still a possibility theres two bucks and some change a month in the budget.

If you can figure out how to make a Debian usb installer without help then you’ll be fine.

Does she want this?

If so then just set her up exactly what you have so you can easily help when there’s a problem.

If not then get her the computer she actually wants.

None of that matters.

You need experience, not recommendations.

Install anything and play with it to learn.

If you will not go forward without a recommendation, Debian is fine and anything you learn will generally transfer to other distributions.

They are not irrelevant points and hopefully I can show why.

So I went fishing through the kernel rust directory and didn’t find any drivers. It’s late and I definitely missed a lot (I didn’t even go through the drivers branch, but should rust code be there? I thought it all lived in /rust…), but the r4l page lists the nvme driver, an implementation of existing functionality in rust that is in the words of its description page “not suitable for general use”. The r4l page also has the null block driver, which is not a strictly speaking useful thing for actually doing stuff with the computer but is a great way to do a bunch of goofy crap and its page on the r4l website explains why it’s being rewritten in rust.

I just want to pause here in the comment and say that the null block driver is actually a phenomenal thing to be rewriting in rust for so many reasons.

Then there’s the android binder driver which is not something I understand enough to comment on, but is a rewrite in rust. I also saw a puzzlefs driver on the r4l page. Puzzlefs is an experimental file system written in rust to begin with so it’s no surprise the Linux driver is rust.

Last the r4l page offers two gpu drivers, the apple one that asahi uses and the nvidia nova one which seems to be in the early stages of development.

As I said, I probably missed some drivers and other rust code that needs to use —since it’s our topic of discussion— the c dma bindings through a wrapper.

But if all six of those used the dma c bindings wrapper then that’s still far short of my agreement with you that the right way would be to write a bunch of good rust shit that uses the wrapper then say “hey, if we move this wrapper into dma directly it’ll save 10k lines of code because it’s a hundred lines and used in a hundred things”.

Instead it’s used by three rewrites (the point of r4l!), an experimental file system, a in development gpu driver and the asahi mac driver.

For a third time, I’m absolutely 100% sure there’s more rust drivers than that, but enough to make the argument that you’re taking a hundred lines out of a hundred places?

When I was younger I was involved in local government. I was idealistic and thought that having been accepted at the table, the correctness of my ideas would be evident and they would be accepted and implemented quickly. Of course I was very wrong and was surrounded by competing interests vying for limited resources so the force of my argumentation had almost no effect.

What was effective was constructing scenarios that made it almost impossible for people to act in ways other than what I wanted.

I chose a narrative analogous to the common rust person complaint of “political reasons” here on purpose because ultimately instead of appealing to an authority to settle the chicken or egg problem for them (which is somehow not political, despite the authority existing within some governing structure but whatever!) rust devs should be saying “who the fuck cares, I’m headed to market with a cartload of chickens and eggs, you gonna give me a stall to sell out of or am I gonna be clogging up the thouroughfares?”

Learn cacti

I’m not at a computer with the source on it, so if you get to it before me, how many rust drivers are there? How many that would use the rust dma wrapper?

I ask because last year there were relatively few.

People writing in c don’t have to use a wrapper because there’s no need to wrap c code for use by other c code.

More broadly there are times when duplicated c code has been condensed into a library or something and added to the kernel.

Yes, literally include the wrapper code in every rust driver that needs it then when you push the wrapper on its own you can say “this code is currently duplicated 900 times because there isn’t a rust wrapper” not “this would make it easier for hypothetical rust drivers that might hypothetically exist in the future” and no one will bat an eye!

That’s how you get things added to the kernel!

If it was about adding rust code to the kernel, which is what r4l universally says they’re doing, then they’d be taking that approach instead of farting around with the chicken and egg problem trying to get rust everything first.

That’s the whole point of the part of my comment that you dismissed out of hand. They’re nearly universally behaving in a way that it takes actual concerted brainpower to read as anything other than duplicitous.

And then when people say “hey, why don’t you not act like that” you get responses like “Linus said we could!” And “nontechnical nonsense” and “Dino devs”.

I don’t think that’s a broken foundation.