The older your CPU, the more dramatic the benefits get, due to the lack of windows bloat, kernel level anticheat, etc.

Copyright killed the internet star.

Its not about forcing anyone.

Its about empowering them with a more complex communication medium that allow them to send and receive photos videos and voice notes. Not just with you, but with other people as well.

The process can be quite empowering for them. I would say discuss the option with them and let them decide.

I know many grandparents that made the effort to stay in touch with Children and Grandchildren.

They are not incapable of learning, they just need sufficient motivation and support.

Something like signal is simpler and less likely to push slop their way.

Also look at some of the simplified launchers available for android. It allows you to setup a locked down UI for them that hides everything they don’t need.

EDIT: I used BIG launcher in the past with my 84 year old grandfather to great success.

Why is VoLTE important for you?

If you are worried about privacy, you should not use normal phone services.

In my case, I setup a ZFS pool of my disks in my old desktop PC running Proxmox. Then I allocated some storage to an LXC container running Debian and Samba for file sharing.

In your case, since the QNAP already runs Samba, it would be best to run it directly on the NAS.

But if you want to do it for the learning experience, you can setup an NFS share on the QNAP and link it to the Proxmox. The Proxmox can then use the NAS for storage and you can have VMs or LXC contsiners use for virtual disks.

I am quite satisfied with the unifi ecosystem so far as networking and CCTV systems go. They are cloud enabled without being cloud dependent. Since the early 2025 networking update, their routers are pretty good now. The UDM SE is a pretty compelling router/POEswitch/NVR in the home context.

Their NAS ecosystem is still very new and I would not it a viable option yet. They are also leaning towards the vendor lock-in direction with drives. Its the same reason I would stay away from Synology and QNAP.

Personally, I run a old desktop as a NAS/homelab running Proxmox(FOSS based hypervisor). I run ZFS on it and its “fine”. It performs fine even with a mixed bunch of disks, provided you have them in pairs or groups of 3 that perform close to identically. I just run a Debian container on the Proxmox as my fileserver and a few VMs for homelabbing.

One player that works well in a home environment is UnRAID. It a Linux distor that runs on commodity hardware and handles redundancy with “just a bunch of disks” better than most. The UI is friendly to non technical users. The catch is that UI is commercial software. Many consider it a fair exchange for the convenience it brings.

These people should get grant funding for reducing e-waste and Apple should pay for it.

I have had this with some laptops if the charger is faulty. The laptop goes into a limp mode, where the CPU locks to its lowest clock speed.

Since the display is using USB-C it may be triggering the slowness. Some USB-C monitors also deliver power to the connected device.

Is the laptop slow, even when running off battery, or only when running off battery?

Keeping an eye on the CPU frequency with something like Btop can maybe help troubleshoot the issue.

Would love to see work on getting broader application support like for microsoft office.

If you get stuck with Winboat, as its still a very new project, you might want to have a look at winapps, which is very similar

https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

In addition to other advice, with only hardware, have 1 cold spare drive for every 2 years of remaining life of the hardware. It gets difficult to find similar spec drives the older they get. So if you want to use the drives in the NAS for another 4 years, get 2 spares. After that you start getting into the territory of replacing the drives anyway.

My rule for older hardware, before trusting the ZFS fault reporting, I would follow the following steps.

(Note these are homelabber steps and not what I would do in the enterprise, where risk and time is a lot more expensive than replacing hardware)

0. Check the Smart data of the drive. If it reports the drive as faulty, replace it.

1. Zpool clear the error and see if it comes back. Sometimes drive errors are not cause by the drive itself

2. Reseat the drive and the cables between the motherboard and the drive. Clear errors after this step. Especially with older hardware and it having travelled from its previous owner to you, something might not be seated properly.

3. Move the drive to another drive bay, or swap it with another drive. If the errors move with the drive, the drive is faulty. If the errors move to the bay, you probably have a good drive, but a faulty drive bay/cable.

He just needs to stay on the 580 driver. Bazzite is handling that transparently and wont update you to the 590 driver if you have an unsupported GPU.

Then next time round, buy an AMD or Intel GPU. They tend tp treat their customers better.

Zorin OS makes it easier with their Gnome skins and their touch input preset theme.

Its basically Ubuntu LTS underneath the custom UI changes. Similar to Mint’s approach, but still using Gnome.

Laptops make excellent low power draw servers. Disabling the laptop lid switch is typically trivial. (Tickbox usually)

Also running x86 is an advantage over SBCs like the raspberry pi. Also, use what you have before you buy anything.

Open Transport Tycoon.

It does. I just checked.

Edit: my guest is running Debian 12, but I dont see why Truenas would be different.

I believe that was a KVM bug that got fixed a few years ago.

Also, you need to pass through disks by ID (the current default in proxmox Gui) and not by /dev/sdX

Video editing with open source software is still a bit rough on Linux, Kdenlive is there, but you will probably have a much better experience with Davinci Resolve. They have native linux support and most distros are well supported.

Mint should be fine for that. What I think this poster is encountering is that Mint does not always run well on the latest and greatest hardware. The Mint team favours a well tested and older base.

Bazzite and Fedora are a bit friendlier to newer hardware, but not quite as bleeding edge as Arch bases Distros.

Remember that starting with Mint and migrating to something else a year later is a normal and healthy Linux journey, as is staying on Mint for years.

Welcome to having choice! And in my opinion, being an kick ass partner