If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.

They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

Okay I got another stupid question. You have everything going to the rear of the pc, but often times motherboards will have a riser to send audio to the front or top of the case so you can plug your headset in there. Do you have this facility and if so does running to it make any difference?

I may end up having to bow out but if I don’t get to keep trying to help: at some point you’ll need to fire up a daw or obs or jack or something to figure out if you can actually see the signal you’re dealing with anywhere.

The troubleshooting process I’m working through is more akin to what you’d do if you were at a big old mixing console trying to figure out why there’s no sound as opposed to the seemingly more obvious process of tracing device drivers and whatnot.

It’s been very helpful to me when troubleshooting sound issues “in the box”, so if you get stumped fiddlefarting around with lspci and whatnot, give it a shot from that side.

That’s great! What does kmix show?

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This is gonna sound stupid, but plug and unplug your jack a few times with sound playing.

What does Kmix show?

E: actually before you check that, do the speakers play sound from the mac when plugged in to it directly?

I didn’t read all that too closely.

Do you have sound coming from the speakers plugged into the pc when you play a sound on the pc?

Some distributions have that. Some have it built into the tools like arch. For some you just boot your installation media and run only the “install bootloader” step.

About the only universal way is to boot usb, pivot-root or chroot to switch to the installed system you wanna run and do grub-install, although you need to understand a few things about your system to not make errors.

Once you pick something to stick with, go ahead and look up its process. Think of it like practicing changing a tire in the grocery store parking lot before you actually need to do it on the side of the road.

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?