I set up Ubuntu for my somewhat non-technical brother (not as non technical as you mentioned, but not someone who will ever open CLI), and they used it happily until their laptop got too old and they had to change (5-7 years, even upgraded to next LTS once)

So, I will vote for something stable and mainstream like that. Set up steam on that, and they should be good to go.

Most probably graphics / nividia issue. But not a general issue, related to the configuration or hardware or something.

For most such cases when you can’t figure out anything, it’s generally a good idea to ask in your distro’s support forum. There are people who can usually help you debug a few things. It doesn’t always solve your problem, but you can get some possible pointers.

You can dual boot both Windows and Linux, and the reboot to Windows when you want to play games, and reboot to Linux for other stuff.

A bit of work, and extra space needed, but you can easily do that.

I always thought it’s just something you say, whenever upgrading to anything newer. Even if there are no additional benefits.

No arguments there.

They are machines, they can have any number of issues, but generally speaking, if a game is released on a console (and it works) then it will work for you too. No worrying about configs or system requirements.

No info about “how to make sure game is gonna run”, that is actually one of the reason I switched to console so many years ago.

BTW you don’t have to worry about not being able to play physical games on PS, even if it doesn’t come with optical drive by default, they will always sell the attachment. At least for next 2 or so generations (if not more), too many people with physical games exist.

Probably don’t want to antagonize MS, but don’t know how things work at this level, so just randomly guessing.

No idea tbh. I mainly play on consoles, and until a few days back I didn’t even know Xbox publishes game on Steam too. Will have to check protondb. Will take a look.

A bit off topic, but I have been using Arch for over a decade now, and it has been pretty stable for me. My only issue in last few years were if my kernel got updated which needed updated nvidia driver, and I rebooted before noticing that. (Very old laptop, so nvidia drivers for this aren’t in repos, hence the issue). I didn’t use it for gaming though (very old laptop, wouldn’t even run old games)

BTW I recently went the opposite way, have been using only Linux for over a decade but got a new laptop a month back and kept the windows as a dual boot, though my main interest is to use it only for MS/Xbox first party games, that don’t have Linux support. Saving me from buying a separate Xbox.

This is the only game in the genre I have played, and while the graphics look like a flash game, the game is very fun.