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.

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.