Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don't want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.

Yeah, I agree. Especially since there's SO much information out there that'll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn't good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It's best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.

That's what free software advocates have been telling everyone for decades. When you use proprietary software licensed to you, you have no agency in what becomes of it, they can force you to accept changes that you don't agree with, violate your privacy, take what you thought you owned from you.
People give up freedom for convenience and treat those that don't as crazy misguided idealists, thinking they're fools for using less convenient and sometimes powerful fools for pointless principles only they care about... Meanwhile, if everyone was just a tiny bit like the crazy idealists, these companies wouldn't be able to abuse their position because a modicum of resistance from everyone would be an overwhelming force for them.
Some will say it's dumb being idealist about computer software, but aside from computer software being serious fucking business, the practices of these companies are what birthed disposable, unrepairable electronics, privacy erosion, robber AIs and so on. Do you think a tech industry dominated by free software supporters would have allowed the rise of people like Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk?

AMD or NVIDIA user?

People have their gripes over the "big corporation" side of this but I also daily drive fedora KDE and I love it. My only complaint is 2 things.

1. Wireless shuts off after long periods of sleep. Suck if I'm torrenting my Linux isos.

2. Very rarely it'll freeze up and I need to hard restart.

Both of which could be a me issue. But besides that it's a beautiful, easily and highly customizable system. Highly reccomend as well.

I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?

I'm a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn't have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver

Same here. I do not miss all the shit windows did. Things like:

• starting drivers manually to use graphics tablet
• finding drivers for hardware that work
• random driver crashes for various pieces of hardware I have
• BSODs
• rummaging around settings, configs and regedit to get something to work a bit better
• disabling things you don't want through regedit or some hidden config
• uninstallable bloatware
• ads everywhere
• super key + type in the program you want to open not working
• messing around with tons of files for old games to work
• going through shady sites to get software
• not having a software center for all your downloads
• needing to install weird programs for sftp support
• needing to reinstall the os when a big issue develops and you did not manually set up backups

ironically half these things are what people think is the linux ux. Seriously, windows is just terrible, clunky, buggy and full of things you need to be an advanced user to fix.

Take it slow and do it the right way, don't let Lemmy pressure you if you're making slow but steady progress. It's a learning curve for sure

I have four pieces of advice

1. btrfs file system for easy backup and recovery
2. Encrypt your drive
3. use an ad blocker everywhere
4. use virus total to scan anything you might be wary of, and if you really feel like you need an AV, they do exist for Linux.

I usually prefer Debian based systems, but when I finally ditched windows 3 weeks ago, I switched to Manjaro, and I'm loving it. You got this!

Basically don't run random sudo(superuser do, root access) commands you find on the internet without reading what the command does from docs or asking ai.

Leaving windows makes you more secure.

Also don't worry about turning secureboot off. It makes it a lot less annoying and gets rid of a lot of issues. Also also steam doesn't like running on linux and having it's library on windows filesystem you gotta format them both, if your games are on a separate drive.

There you go, the two hurdles i had with linux.

As you can't ditch it for alternatives, I suggest:

• KVM, kernel-based VM for better performance. See this vid about setting it up: https://youtu.be/BgZHbCDFODk Licenses (and cr=cks) should work, judging by the Adobe forums, but you'd have an overhead with Windows running, so you'd greatly win by stripping everything off from it, up to disabling system services or even their Explorer DE (like some gamers did with Win Aero in W7 times, killing it while the game was running).
• Wine (Proton) directly or via Bottles\Lutris\Steam increased it's emulation capabilities and performance in the previous years. It works for highly demanding games, talks OK with my various discrete v-cards, skips the Win10 overhead, shows CC apps not unlike other programs, but it can cause random bugs, apps not communicating right to each other, and activating it may be not as straightforward. Before starting to rely on that, it's better to test your exact worklfow, tools you use, etc.

You'd be probably drown in a question of what Linux distro to choose, considering there's stuff like AV Linux or Pop_OS being recomended for media design. But you'd easily hop from one to another as you go, so it's better to install something as simple as Mint first, and try Adobe workarounds there before moving next.

If you have specific hardware, I'd say that Wacom-like graphic tablets work like they should (tried several pieces, adapted some touchscreen devices, nearly out-of-the-box on modern Linux), but for something else, like controllers that need to talk to your programms in some special way, you'd better google their compatibility or try it yourself. Making a passthru of inputs to VM or taking it's inputs by Wine wouldn't usually be a problem, problems start when this piece needs a specific Win\Mac-only driver, and they can, especially if they are old, have a temper of a feral ghoul. I know that there are a lot of linuxoids creating in different kinds of media, so I'm pretty sure there are some answers on the web, at least for the same manufacturer, series or kind of hardware.

There is nothing wrong if someone doesn't want to switch to a new OS. That being said, isn't her buying a new computer better? Old one becomes unused then.

Putting lightweight linux on an unused old computer and seeing it become better is like the standard procedure. You could even make a custom rice for her.