I am running macbook air mid 2012 with Linux mint with installed closed source driver from mint driver manager and works fine without fearing me to update since mint based on Ubuntu LTS

ujust setup-virtualization, distrbox ,homebrew are ur friends

Please open process monitor GUI or htop and filter what using CPU all time on 100%

Scratch basically doing this

Install something like edubuntu with gcompiz

Unfortunately no u need load in usual mode and using ssh from phone for example connect to ur PC to collect logs

The only my possible suppose that there are something wrong with current driver of and amd team fucked possibly. Can u load on arch and using ssh to collect logs from dmesg about amdgpu module

Nomodeset is disabling all DRI kernel modules related to videocard so no surprise that u cannot modprobe it .just for test to u have windows somewhere on second disk to test if problem repeating there too to exclude hardware problem

Try to downgraded Linux kernel version or better install linux-lts and use it for now

So what ur video card?

+1 for VM

Yes u can do it fine :) I think it can handle maybe light PSP games

Uh um with such hardware the best would be to make old console emulation with such disto https://www.lakka.tv/

I like bazzite but why not mint would good option 580 driver already in their repo so what problem at all he can expect

Hmm would be nice if u would provide logs after wake up from dmesg

I think u need try to use more modern versions of linux kernel

+1 privacy and idea about freedom software

The biggest ability for to do anything about system is MacOS only everything else so much locked down

If u are newbie then linux mint I am using cachyos (arch linux based distro with performance optimizations)

Notepadqq not the best reimplementation of notepad++ I am using NotepadNext https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext