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.

If you’re mechanically inclined and can work with small parts, the old Sony branded walkmans are generally good quality and have a decent supply of replacement parts. Some of the new portables have awful wow and flutter that will make it seem like that two step is a polyrhythm!

I listen on my phone in the world, cd and tape when I’m driving and on whatever at home. Today it was goat and escape-ism.

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.

I was gonna say pit vipers but they’re American.

You should get some vipes anyway, they make a safety rated ballistic pair.

Once I had a pair bought from someone on eBay break on me and they just wanted to confirm there was a joke written on the frame before sending a replacement pair for free. I think I had to pay shipping or something but standing behind an eBay purchase from a third party is cool.

You’ll fit right in.

What do you like to listen to and what do you like to listen on?

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

You’re posting in the internet right now. I suggested that you tell people you are trying to get away from computers

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.

This is where you lose me. I’m not a good programmer or a very smart person, but I have enough experience with c, c++ and rust to know that those wrappers don’t need to be in the kernel if the kernel has c bindings.

If I were writing something in rust I could just include the r4l wrapper for the kernels c bindings and everything would work fine. The wrapper doesn’t need to be in the kernel.

There’s a fundamental disconnect here. When people speaking about r4l including official statements from the r4l project say “our plan to add rust, a language intended to address shortcomings of c, to the kernel is only for new code, not a rewrite of existing systems.” I don’t believe them.

Not only do supporters of and contributors to the r4l project make offhanded remarks about how different things would be better if they were written in rust but if they truly believed in the language’s superiority to c then they would be trying to replace existing c code with rust.

Then the whole rust using and supporting world melts down when people oppose adding it into an existing huge c codebase.

Then they all complain that they’re being discriminated against for “nontechnical reasons”, which is becoming a great dog whistle for if you should just disregard someone’s opinion on rust outright.

Perhaps that explains some of why I don’t believe rust people when they flip out over not being allowed to do the thing that no one else is allowed to do either.

So why can’t rust modules use the c bindings?

What im building towards is: if r4l isn’t about replacing c code then it doesn’t need to be in the kernel. If its about replacing c code (which it absolutely should be, that’s the whole point of memory safe languages like rust) then r4l people need to have a clear process and understanding of how they expect to accomplish that goal and be open about it.

For the purposes of the average person the tech guy in your op is absolutely 100% correct.

All the platforms listed use transport encryption and that’s enough to avoid mitm surveillance which is enough for most people.

Most people’s “threat model” is the police or a pi. All the apps listed including signal have to comply with orders from American police and have “sidechain attacks” that involve stuff like getting some member of the groupchat’s device and scrolling up or tricking someone into giving up sensitive information.