I run teams and Outlook using versions in electron wrappers. For one drive I have to use the web interface to get to the shared storage because our folks don’t know how to set it up and I don’t care enough to figure it out for them.

I have one application that I really need to use that I still can’t get working in Linux but I’m still trying.

Highly doubtful since it’s AMD to AMD.

No.

Honestly moving to a KDE desktop environment along with any well maintained Linux distro will feel like going back to Windows 7 but now with modern powershell

There will always be a few things different like not needing to download apps from websites. But most of the rest will feel normal.

Nearly everything you are talking about is easy and built into the vast majority of desktop linux distributions, and more than a few server ones too!

RDP: Remmina, KDE (windows like Desktop Environment)

Hyper-V: KVM+QEMU, but im going to ask why? There are very few reasons to do full virtual machines these days when you can just run everything as containers.

Plex: Plex

RAID5: use ZFS Z5 or linux mdadm r5. The advantages of ZFS is that you get lots of tools like snapshots, and reslivering which helps prevent bit rot.

Depending on your hardware I would honestly suggest your host OS be Proxmox, and then just run your gaming/personal system as a VM with GPU pass through. Proxmox has all the KVM+QEMU tools and ZFS tools baked in with a good web UI that makes managing these things easier.

zimablade or zimaboard easy setup and casaos or zimaos make selfhosting easy with preconfigured apps/containers mine is an intel quad core with 8gb and pcie 4x slot.

Ahh, I got mine used when a window 11 update “bricked” a lots of them. Rather than do am RMA this guy just got a new one and gave me the old ones saying if I could fix it then I could keep it.

Unbricking was not easy so I can understand why he just replaced it.

Yes it has a USB c port for e GPU and as an input to be a 2nd monitor for a laptop.

It’s not really upgradable as it’s a highly integrated package. But I will have to replace the battery at some point and will let you know.

Yes I got a generic surface pen and it worked out of the box without any tweaking.

I have a minis forum v3 that I use all the time. It’s got decent CPU and GPU for a laptop class.

It competent runs Indy and older games, has reasonable battery life, and the general performance is more than enough for productivity.

Touch screen works flawlessly, accelerometer required some tinkering as did volume control. Thumb scanner was easy to get working. I have not gone back to try getting the IR camera for face detection working.

I would live boot or install side by side another more modern distro before dumping the card. It’s a fine card it just requires effort to get working unlike AMD/Intel.

Good to know that your different distribution works well with your different GPU.

Great but it’s not working out of the box and clearly that was the expectation.

AMD has built in support so no extra steps needed.

Ubuntu has a history of not having the latest kernels and having spotty support for new hardware.

Sure you can fix it but again the out of the box expectation.

We can agree that it should work and can work and I don’t disagree that always suggestions a different distribution is not generally helpful but watching people suffer trying to get Ubuntu working is a sore spot for me.

I hate to be the jerk but it’s because you got Nvidia. Intel and AMD cards enjoy significantly better graphics card support.

I would also try a different distribution that’s known for having more recent kernels and faster development. Something like Manjaro is actually a pretty good fit for this situation.

There’s no performance improvement to wiping an SSD. At least not meaningfully, on a completely empty SSD that has been factory wiped. You may see a first time right improvement but that goes away as soon as the SSD starts doing garbage collection.

As for your other reasons, they’re completely up to you.

https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy

Take a look at Howdy, like finger print it wont allow full access but once you log in at first boot you should be able to lock and log back in using your face or other bio-metric.

Resize your partitions so you can use the empty space.

Then install to the new position.

Update grub.

Distro’s are not like picking between windows or mac, Nearly all linux distributions are based on the same linux kernel and many of the base GNU packages. The main differences between distributions are philosophical.

Some distro’s will focus on free as in speech over free as in beer meaning if something has closed source, or proprietary code they may or may not include it. You can still download and install proprietary software and drivers regardless of this initial choice.

Some distro’s will have a preferred package manager which is like their software or app store, but if you dont like the one they picked you can install a different one.

As for security, linux is as secure as you make it, its vastly more secure than Windows out of the box, and probably more secure than MacOS but we dont really know because both Apple and Microsoft dont publish their code so we cant review or audit its security. Setting up a secure linux install is dead simple and you can find dozens of guides for every distribution and edge case.

Since the main tool you want to run is Davinci Resolve it makes sense to see what distribution they test against and go with that, rather than pick an arbitrary “secure” distribution. It will be simpler to harden their preferred distro than to take a hardened distro and make their software work on it.

I suggest checking their website and going with their top suggestion.

KDE has good tablet mode support, and I strongly suggest using Xournal++ if she intends to use a stylus and take hand written notes.