I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.
Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.
TL;DR I am a nerd.
General Use:
Gaming Focused:
When picking a distro for gaming, I always recommend using one that gets frequent/fast updates. All my recommendations get fast updates. If you are mainly just gaming, go with a gaming focused distro. If you want a system without many apps or modifications, go the general use route.
I can elaborate on each of my picks on request.
For setting up and selecting Piper TTS voices, use Pied. Then use KMouth by KDE to have an app to paste text in an make use of Piper TTS voices.
That plus KMouth would be exactly what OP wants. KMouth is an app you can paste text in and have speechd play it.
Mullvad has many methods of obscuring the fact that you are sending VPN traffic, specifically designed to fight VPN censorship and firewalls.
Matrix with either Element or Fluffychat
Officially from the Tor Project there is also oniux. From the blog, “a small command-line utility providing Tor network isolation for third-party applications using Linux namespaces”.
I liked qdirstat
Seconding fish shell. Very nice experience and the only real downside (or upside depending on perspective) is the non-POSIX syntax for some things.
If all you need is a simple note taking app, I recommend Notesnook. It is free and open source and offers E2EE cloud syncing. That is what I used as a Google keep alternative. Silverbullet is good, but may be too feature-full for something as simple as a Keep replacement.
I use Varia as my graphical download manager. It has download acceleration built in thanks to aria2. I get often double or triple the download speed (depending on the website). For example, when I downloaded the Fedora Workstation ISO from fedoraproject I got download speeds from 18mbs normal to 60mbs with Varia. Free and open source of course, available on Windows and Linux.
Include mode, selecting your Torrent app.
Pretty good unless your game doesnt enable anticheat support for Linux like the battlefield games or fortnite for example. Performance per game is either on par or better than Windows. Game support can be checked on https://protondb.com/
Website’s style breaks without 3rd party scripts permission. Not that that’s indicative of the quality of the distro, but I don’t like websites that depend heavily on Google, Cloudflare, and external CDNs for scripts since it makes the website less secure.
I’d pick openSUSE Slowroll. Easy, monthly updates, comes with YaST system tooling.
It will have some challenges but the documentation is decent. If security matters to you, it has better protections than any other Linux distro (Qubes OS isn’t technically a distro). If you have a problem, first check to see if it is a Secureblue issue then check if it is an upstream Fedora atomic issue.
Secureblue eliminates many attack vectors. It is also recommended by PrivacyGuides. Worth trying if you can find davinci resolve as a Flatpak or Fedora RPM.
I personally like GNOME/GTK. I think it is easy, but I recommend deviating from the default. The extension “Dash to Dock” is good for a former Mac user because it makes all the pinned apps viewable without pressing the super key.
What I will say about KDE is it can be whatever you want it to be. It is feature rich and its customization is unparalleled. You can customize it into looking like MacOS. I personally think Qt apps look ugly, which is why I go GNOME. KDE also has there ‘K’ naming scheme for apps, which can be confusing to new users who are looking for “Text Editor” when they should be search for “KWrite”.
Both are good. Maybe set up two VMs, one with KDE customized a little to look familiar to a Mac user, and the other GNOME. See whether she has a preference for the look and feel of each, especially the default apps because she will end up interacting with them a lot.
Alienware should be Dell I think. Is there a security tab in the BIOS?
Secure Boot settings should be under the Security tab in the BIOS.
Your hardware is most likely not free and open source. If you use non-free hardware, it is better to have security fixes then leave it unpatched. If you are using non-free hardware it doesn’t matter how free your distro is, you still must depend on hardware blackboxes. Your hardware can directly interact with your distro and do something malicious regardless of the presence of firmware blobs.
Those distros (Fefora & Debian) are fully free, but acknowledge that hardware isn’t in most cases. And like responsible and reasonable developers they choose what is best for stability and security.