CaptainJack42

Im running a 7000 card on Arch since January (7900xt) without issues. For the first 1-2 months I had to install the git version of the drivers from a separate repo, but it still worked like a charm, a thousand times better than Nvidia (not only performance wise)

Sounds pretty cool, though as others have mentioned it is pretty niche and I don't think I'd recommend doing this if your goal is earning money, if you're doing it out of personal interest as a hobby and because you think it is a fun project, absolutely go for it, no harm done in gaining some experience.

The idea of the side scroller would be, to give that application a compelling frontend and to "gamify" these tasks even more

This sounds a bit like hamster simulator, which we used in high school in our "programming" class, the site is in German, but you might the idea. But I can absolutely see how you can make this more compelling.

From what I recall veracrypt is basically the only option, but I've never bothered setting it up myself, i just use luks on everything these days, but you won't be able to use that with windows, though it might be possible using WSL, but I don't know

My dad also made the switch to mint cinnamon about 3 years ago and I only had to fix things once for him (which was something in partitioning/fstab he or the installer messed up), he has successfully updated and maintained the system for 3 major releases yet and is even happier with Linux on his home laptop than with windows on his work laptop

Edit: he's not really tech savvy or something, he's a teacher by profession

Lightweight DEs are cool and such, but if that's the thing you're saving on a lightweight WM (like xmonad, DWM or i3) will probably be the best bet

Not really my kind of work, but I have played around with an ultimaker 3d printer I got gifted a while ago, Cura works perfectly fine, fusion does not, I have used freecad on Linux, but even for a beginner like me it was no comparison to fusion

This or add the grubx64.efi file to the trusted secure boot files

But around the same time mozilla shortened the support cycles for their lts releases

I might look into getting a refurbished ThinkPad or something before buying new hardware for this laptop, you'll probably get a lot more performance out of this than upgrading that old laptop

There's a simple reason why Mozilla/canonical does this and that is security fixes. Due to the difference in support cycles of Firefox and Ubuntu LTS versions fixes would have to be manually backported to the system Firefox version and newer versions won't run due to library dependencies. Snap solves all of that.

Don't get me wrong though, snap is still terrible, but other than flatpak or doing the work of backporting it's the only option to get security fixes to Ubuntu

As long as you don't want to run Wayland anyways

Yep, had a similar experience with anything Ubuntu based, especially on Acer laptops. Can easily be fixed by just adding grubx64.efi to the trusted secure boot files in the bios though