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?

You are agreeing with the person you replied to lol

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.

You seem to be reaching for pretty advanced solutions – Docker and HA both require you to read a lot of documentation to get started. Bottles is also a powerful and flexible tool, which is the opposite of simple.

What game are you trying to run? If it’s on Steam it should be a no-brainer, otherwise Lutris can simplify a lot of things.

I doubt you actually need Docker for anything, unless you have a specific use case I would just abandon that. For your lights, I would try searching for “home assistant [model/brand of lights]” and see if you can find a setup that someone else has gotten working that you can mostly copy.

I think so – gamers these days complain about having 50 ping or less than 120fps. There’s certainly a point at which it seriously impacts your gameplay, but I find it laughable when they can’t even deal with better performance than even existed 15 years ago.

You can game on just about any distro – I’m using NixOS and it’s great for many reasons, but also can be a real pain to learn and to solve new problems.

But if you’re looking for the easiest to set up that will be most likely to just work and gaming is a priority, go for Bazzite.

I will second Fedora and Debian as extremely solid, well-supported distros, though both will require some initial setup (mostly enabling nonfree repos, especially for Nvidia gpus)

SteamOS works great for the steam deck, there really aren’t any extra features that I can think of that are useful from bazzite. Updates happen often enough… There’s just not really any reason to go through the effort of changing to bazzite and reinstalling everything, but I guess it shouldn’t hurt either.

It’s not always preferable to be constantly updating to the most bleeding edge available… On the contrary, for something like a handheld gaming device I think stability is a bigger priority. Most of the updates that might, for example, make a game start working better, will be from Proton anyway, and your choice of OS makes no difference to how fast you get those, they’re either from Steam or the ProtonUp app, which will get you the latest custom versions from GloriousEggroll.

There’s a big overhaul update that got teased after over a year of radio silence, fingers crossed that it comes out soon!

In my experience it either works or it doesn’t, based on whether the devs have blocked it or not. The only extra step I’ve needed to do for anti-cheat on Steam games is installing a Proton runtime for the given anti-cheat, which are just in the tools section.

BattleEye and EAC have both worked on Linux since 2021. Any games that use those at this point but don’t support Linux are choosing to block the platform (e.g. Fortnite).

I wouldn’t recommend replacing your steam deck os with bazzite… What’s the expected benefit?

They won’t run on proton. “Kernel-level” means it’s well below the level that Proton runs at.

If you don’t plan to expand the swap partition, I would recommend just deleting the swap partition – you could either make it a new ext4 and use LVM to combine it with the shared storage, or if you’re going to combine your EFI partitions you could grow your Mint partition to include both the SUSE EFI and the swap partition – and using a swap file instead, as another commenter mentioned. You honestly really don’t need swap space regardless with 16gb of RAM if you’re really just using this to run a web browser, but you can easily set up a swap file if you want one.

Tax software is basically all in browser at this point.

Is there any reason? You’re effectively wasting half the drive by using that space for OSes you almost never use.

If you ever happen to need Windows, which I don’t see happening as you yourself can’t imagine an actual use case, you can just go to the library or borrow a friend’s computer or maybe use your phone.

As for Mint, do you just have it to experiment with? If you’re just trying to try out other distros, a virtual machine or even live USBs are much easier ways to quickly try out new systems without having to clear actual partitions.

If you had much more storage then sure, waste some of it, but you’re really gonna be missing that 120gb if you use your computer for… basically anything.

The order of the partitions basically doesn’t matter at this point – I think having a boot partition first used to be important for MBR schemes but I’m pretty sure in the UEFI era you can have them in whatever order. As others have mentioned, you could combine your EFI partitions, but doing so to an already installed system is slightly complex. You also could shrink some of your EFI and boot partitions, I’m not sure of the recommended sizes off the top of my head but I think they could be smaller. On the other hand, your swap partition should probably be bigger – making it the same size as your RAM is a good rule of thumb and will enable hibernation (I think).

Oh it almost certainly won’t save you time unless you already know Nix and how the ecosystem works. But it does make rolling back to previous configurations basically effortless, which seems like it would obviate your need for a full staging drive.

Sounds like you could benefit from NixOS ;)

Note: the growing the partition from a live USB thing is only necessary if you want it all to be one partition. If it’s a separate drive, or even if it’s not, you can just format the old Windows partition/drive and mount it as a new storage volume.