half the internet is 45 years old this year.

garbage in, garbage out.

Following the decision, Nvidia estimated the decision would cost the GPU giant nearly $10.5 billion in the first half of its 2026 fiscal year. AMD reported the export ban would cost the firm $1.5 billion in lost revenues in 2025.

and they wouldn’t be able to find customers elsewhere for their in-demand products to mitigate some or even all of that “lost” revenue?

if you go in not knowing what to do, it can seem ‘difficult’. but it’s mostly like on any other oem prebuilt:

optional: prep the target disk (backups, wipe or clear part table, etc), reset bios to defaults.

if necessary: switch from raid or rst to ahci sata mode, default boot mode to efi, disable secure boot. note that some distributions support secure boot but your method of creating an installer might not–you may be able to re-enable if you want after install.

note that hp systems have a hoop to jump through (a confirmation prompt to disable) after disabling secure boot on the next startup. do not use esc key to trigger boot menu, use f9 for boot menu, f10 for bios entry… as esc will cancel the confirmation code prompt and automatically re-enable secure boot.

insert or plug-in installer, hit the magic key upon power on (f12 for dell, f9 for hp) to bring up boot menu and select installer media, boot and run installer.

it’s your car now, not the bank’s. so you can reduce your coverage and lower your premiums. the higher rates are to make sure the insurance company doesn’t lower their profits when you drop the ‘full’ coverage.

you’re looking at this

It took eight years to go from 1% to 2% (by April 2021), then just 2.2 years to reach 3% (June 2023), and a mere 0.7 years to hit 4% (February 2024). Now, here we are, at over 5% in the USA

and yea, it’s a good sign. but it actually took thirty-one years to get here.

go through their list of games on protondb to see if linux would be a good fit, it might not be, depending on their library.

you’ve got a nice ‘short list’ of distributions to evaluate. i’d recommend setting each up yourself on a spare system to see how ‘point and click’ they are in setting-up, running, and updating the games they play.

also keep in mind the more hoop-jumping and manual configurations you need to do, the greater the chance of something breaking–like during os or wine-related updates. those kinds of issues are the ones your friend will be relying on you to fix for them so you definitely want to minimize the chances of that happening.