azvasKvklenko

Long term NVIDIA might be going into either upstreaming their nvidia-gpu-open driver into Linux kernel, or they will help Nouveau+NVK development, which works relatively well with modern NVIDIA cards already (and NVIDIA just hired long time Nouveau maintainer)

Actually already usable solution, but the driver is in beta and you need bleeding edge compositor, like kwin_wayland from Plasma 6.1 that’s also in beta as of now, plus new Mesa, Xwayland, maybe something else. Everything that’s required is in AUR

Hardware shouldn’t matter. Hibernation requires big enough swap to fit all of memory and kernel needs to start with resume parameter that points to the swap space it uses for hibernation. Some distros (including mainstream ones like Ubuntu) don’t configure that by default assuming most people don’t want to use it.

NVIDIA will be great OOTB experience in a couple of years, but the official driver will get much better in just couple of months from now.

Just throw a USB stick on them and boot something like Linux Mint (defaults are pretty similar to Windows, should be obvious to anyone how to use it) to see how it runs with no installation and maybe showcase that to someone who could decide explaining briefly what it is and how it’s more lightweight.

I assume these have still some mechanical drives and that will probably be their biggest slow down. Upgrading to SSDs (which is still a lot cheaper than full computers) would bring them second life.

The i5’s have plenty of power for web browsing machines and can still be pretty snappy. Pentiums (4’s?) not so much, but it’s also worth trying

Bazzite is Fedora os-tree immutable distro. It allows installing RPMs but it’s not nearly as flexible as traditional distros. That being said, you can still do basically everything, but not always straightforward. If you need a C/C++ dev env with toolchain and what not, you better of using something like Distrobox or your custom Podman/Docker containers for that.

Pop! The 24.04 update later this year with the whole new Cosmic DE will be absolutely sick

3. Cryptomator has native Linux port. They distribute AppImage, but there’s also a Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/org.cryptomator.Cryptomator Dropbox itself also has native Linux app: https://flathub.org/pl/apps/com.dropbox.Client

I personally use Nextcloud with self-hosted storage and highly recommend it - again, with native Linux app.

You won’t get official support for OneDrive, Google or iCloud, but there are always some 3rd party clients you can try. I’d advise migrating out of those solutions in favor of something more FOSS friendly if you want to get good reliable experience and privacy.

Overrated

No Vulkan and just WineD3D on OpenGL makes it hard to consider good. Might be pretty good after they find a way to run Vulkan on it, which might be tricky given how the hardware was explicitly designed to run just the proprietary Metal API.

Oh, and two more random tips:

• commands like df, lsblk or mount can help checking out state of mounted filesystems
• file pickers usually support drag&drop, whether it’s a file or directory that you drop onto it