May I suggest you change email providers then? You get to hurt google by not giving them your data and support smaller european companies. Here’s a list in no particular order. I personally use Tuta it’s not as feature rich as Gmail but the company is miniscule in comparison. https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers

Yup, “Thinkpad” not the other Think… or …pad. The consumer targeted stuff is bad, even the Lenovo sales rep I got my P14s told me so.

I second used or new Thinkpads. They have good linux support. I use a p14s with arch (btw).

Spent half the day debugging wifi and kernel panic issues during boot. What finally fixed it was adding 5 sec delay to iwd service so wifi card firmware can do it’s thing (or at least I think thats why it helped).

I guess it depends what she does on her pc.

But ignoring that, Mint without sudo. Throw in flatpaks and appimages.

Immutable distros are probably fine too but in my experience they tend to be a bit fussy if you need to change something in the system config.

Ubuntu, always a solid choice for beginners but Gnome shell is a bigger change from windows conpared to Cinamon.

P.S. I have Mint on our TV PC and my SO handdles it without issues.

I just got a Thinkpad P14s Gen 5 with ryzen 7 8840HS/Radeon 780M, 32GB of ram and 1TB nvme ssd. I haven’t even installed the os yet(tried live boot Mint, but I’m going with custom Arch Hyprland setup). I choose it for linux use, because all (enterprise?) Lenovo laptops have linux support, afaik. I was close to going with framework but it’s a bit pricy for me personally.

My editors

• Professionally I use Jetbrains stuff (intellij, pycharm, etc).
• At home I use Neovim because I like to have lsp support, I’m too cheap to pay for IDE’s and I dislike VSCode for personal reasons. For quick edits I use default text editor e.g. kate/gedit.

My opinions on learning new editors

• If you need to go fast now, use what you know best.
• If you have time to learn just try whatever looks cool. Learning a new editor/way to edit text will broaden your horizons even if you don’t end up using it.

While I agree philosophically and would prefer the Debian based version. I personally have had issues with it, myabe it’s my Nvidia graphics.

So for a beginner I would reccomend the version that is considered the “main” version at the moment. Currently it is still Ubuntu based afaik.

Why would anyone criticize Mint as a suggestion? It’s easy to use and stable. I have been using it on my main pc for abut a year with barely any issues (i had more problems on windows). I have tried other distros: mutable, immutable, rolling etc but I always come back to Mint if I want things to just work.

P.S. I have used ubuntu professionally for about 7 years and while I don’t always like it, it is still a solid choice.

I tend to agree, it did glitch out in the past when I held it by one corner between meetings(old work laptop). Not the smartest way to hold a laptop. Interestingly it is working fine now with windows. I gave it away to someone that needed a pc and have been keeping an eye on it.

I second markdown with Nextcloud notes and I’ll add Markor as Android markdown editor. I use the Nextcloud Android client to sync my notes folder. On desktop I use any text editor that has markdown syntax highlighting and/or Nextcloud Notes app on the web.

Pixel polishing. A term we use for frontend code at work (all backend developers).

Like dotfiles. Where most of the customizing happens.

It is not immutable, but use Linux Mint for my tv computer. It is similar enough to windows that my so has no promblem using it. I use it with a 2 in 1 keyboard/touchbad from logitech.