gerdesj

You can find one for $100.

You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.

I run (one of three partners) a small IT company in the UK. I've always Linuxed since around 1998. After messing with RedHat, Mandrake, Yggdrasil and others I settled down and ran Gentoo for many years and then Arch for some more.

I'm gradually dumping the Windows servers and replacing with Linux based beasties. We are also in the throws of replacing VMware with Proxmox.

I also have a pretty decent Kbuntu based desktop/laptop effort. I've done Windows client deployments in the 1000s so I have quite a good idea about compliance etc. An Ubuntu based box can run several AV solutions, secure boot and full disc encryption. Buzz words perhaps but also audit points and will get you over the line for Cyber Essentials Plus (UK).

Libre Office works for me and I used to teach office suites in the 90's! Things have moved on since but a decimal alignment stop is a decimal alignment stop today too (do you know what that means?). I run our Exchange system, and I migrated it from GroupWise back in the day because the kool kids "required" it. Anyway, Evolution with EWS will get you full functionality for a client but with far less faff.

I'm taking my time. I already have at least two employees who are dyed in the wool Windows officianados begging me to migrate them to Linux. I will but it takes time. For example - "drive mappings" or in English: Remote mounts.

CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ . This is an easy to add Windows compat thing. Its rather good. For static desktops its fine but for laptops that move around a lot it can be hard to get the file system mounts working again quickly in a dynamic environment.

CID uses a PAM mount based system and in the past I used another one (autofs I think). However it seems to me that mounts are not dynamic or responsive enough. In the end it is Samba and that might need some fettling as well.

As I said earlier, I'm taking my time (I'm an engineer) but be assured that Linux is quite capable of driving your desktop.

My T shirt says:
Have you tried turning it off and on again

Use what works for you.

I started to answer your question with a list of stuff and then deleted the lot and started again:

What are you really after? Do you fancy a challenge or what?

transflexive LCD

LMGTFM (Me). Oh its easy to read (almost) regardless of light conditions. I too like my notification to be separated and discreetly delivered.

Sorry 8), thanks for the heads up. I'm filling in shipping info now.

Never heard of sh, I use bash and I call it as /usr/bin/bash (for security).

I'm not all in on MS online yet so I can't help you. We run Exchange on prem. I am the MD of my company and have views about the way forwards (and it won't involve MS)

♬This is me ♬ - https://fosstodon.org/@vanillaos/112749170589287081

If the boy has a gaming rig, then he also has a CAD workstation.

I managed to get a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2 running on my 80286 with an 80287 maths co pro that I persuaded my parents to buy me for Chrimbo. Sadly, it was a bit shite. The next version of AutoCAD needed a 32 bit machine with 32 MB (yes MB) of RAM. That was way out of my league.

Depending on the age of the boy and given how long the little darlings are tending to hang around these days, a constructive bribery system in lieu of rent or pocket money enhancement might be in order 8)

such not being able to mix with any type of license

GPL licenced software merely has to comply with the GPL - make your changes available to all etc. The whole point of the GPL is to ensure that you can take but enforces that you give back too. It's the Stone Soup thing.

MIT is loved by say Apple because they can take your work, do their thing and not have to contribute back. To be fair, Appley stuff is now quite a long way away from BSD!

As I'm feeling charitable, I should also point out that CUPS is/was largely Apple driven, as is Avahi/Bonjour. I can deploy a Linux box and expect it to find and setup available printers without having to do anything.

So use either and do ensure you make proper backups, with some reasonable history (retention policy)