Ⓐ☮☭
Something i recently learned:
Your live usb does not need to be the same distro as your main. (And in retrospect that makes total sense but i never realized)
My arch install broke and could not get timeshift to roll back using the arch live usb. But a ubuntu-desktop live usb worked flawlessly.
Cuda and optix are anecdotally three times faster at rendering than any amd solution.
That doesn’t mean amd doesn’t perform well though, its personal preference on how much that time saving is worth it.
Just to add some variation to these comments.
Nvidia works absolutely fine on (arch) linux, that needs to be said. Performance is on par with windows.
Depending on what your needs are its the better choice. (I have a few pieces of software that greatly rely on CUDA)
But the elephant in the room is your need for non proprietary driver. The only open source nvidia does is the strict minimum to catch up and stay competitive on linux (they where losing before). There is a clear winner on this front. Que all the other comments.
Does it support Navidrome/Subsonic?
There is a distinct lack of pretty media players that support it. I know a few but none have been perfect.
Does linux support from manufacturer really matter?
The tuxe laptop convertible may seem nice and if she wants to draw on the screen then you are going to be limited on other options. But I would be worried about that intel gpu.
If you want to do 3d modeling you will need something that is gaming grade. I would rather game on a crappy card than model using one. But i also confess i am not up to date with the last few years of developments in that space.
In my very humble experience with digital art a proper dedicated drawing tablet beats any kind of touchscreen drawing.
So if you comfortable installing a chosen linux distro from a usb. (It really is not difficult, ai and YouTube can guide you trough it) and she is not already adept at touchscreen drawing i would suggest:
Lenovo Legion Both my partner and their mom have one with a different graphics card. Most of this line have nvidia rtx cards and all of those will do the job. Naturally more expensive models will have newer/faster cards.
Wacom intuos i am biased to call wacom tablets great because i have never used any others. I can say the intuos line is much nicer then the older bamboo pen and touch/fun line. Models come in different sizes
Ive had similar ideas on verified unaltered media to combat fake news. Such an archive but for journalism would be a great start.
Ive seen people link that one multiple times and i am at a loss what its about.
The cc 4.0 license it points to does not mention AI at all.
CC even has a page where they state that it probably is legal to train on cc protected content but it depends on context.
https://creativecommons.org/2023/08/18/understanding-cc-licenses-and-generative-ai/
I think someone used ai to mean attribution/alike, international. Which are part of the full name (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International) but still make little sense as an acronym next to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 being the official acronym.
“don’t enter any commands you see online without looking at it first. You can’t trust everyone”
This has somewhat become a staple idea of mine. People trust others online way too easily. Ai isn’t all that different in this but its more obvious to us that there is something to be scared about the uncanny valley.
What it tends to come down to is capacity for personal critical thinking which we should aim to foster more in future generations.
Maybe i assume too much that programmer-minded people naturally come with such skills for troubleshooting and will be capable of responsible ai interactions?
Some people aren’t gonna like me saying this. But when used responsibly chatgpt is the absolute linux mvp.
I stopped being a windows user a month after getting access to gpt4, its been amazing. I learned so much in general and it would not have been feasible for me without there-are-no-dumb-questions-ai
For new users the main question is not what operating system but what window manager as that is what shapes day to day user interaction. KDE plasma is a solid choice.
Installing it on a separate drive should be no problem. Just select the correct drive during install.
I use F10 to get to the boot menu on drive and select the drive it needs to boot from there. I have used it once in the last year and although it required many updates its still working.