The main problem you're gonna have with this is explaining to them the difference between gender and sex, how gender is really just a social construct, that sort of thing. Get them on that first, then the suggetsions of some of the other commenters will probably go down a lot easier.

Really wish we didn't need to wait for politicians to die of old age before we could replace them...

Use the best tool for the job. I LOVE Linux, but as of right now it still has too many deal breakers to be my ONLY OS. I have to run it with Windows 11. That aside, my preferred distro is endeavourOS.

Main deal breakers right now include:

• Anti cheat support (this is getting better)
• Game compatibility (this is NEARLY solved but you still get the occasional game that crashes or doesn't wanna work well)
• Variable refresh rate support on multi monitors (yes wayland exists for this, but...)
• Wayland support isn't quite there. Implementations of it still have extra latency, using xwayland for games can have a performance hit, there's still bugs (looking at you SDDM), etc. Once KDE 6 and wine wayland come out I expect this to be solved
• Multi monitor scaling still sucks. KDE does it the best and I still run into problems with blurry applications on my mixed resolution setup

Fact of the matter is, Windows has none of these issues, and the problems windows does have for me (customization, spying, etc) are a lot less major and easier to deal with then the issues I have on Linux.

If by conservative you mean "you and your friends don't deserve human rights because I don't like you" then hopefully you're not welcome.

I guess all these free services had to implode one day, I just didn't think they'd all choose the same day...

The hardware on the ally is better but the software is weaker in some key areas (while being stronger in others!). Ally has a much more powerful chip (yes 10w exists, these devices all have 2 hour batter lives in games that need power anyways), it has quiter fans, a better screen, and is available potentially at your local best buy.

For software, anti cheat is still a massive hurdle for Linux so if you play any games that have issues on Linux, tough luck. General game compatibility can also still be a problem with Linux, coming from someone who's been using Linux on their main system for 5 years now. Proton updates can break some games, some games work better with certain versions, need extra fixes, or some won't work at all. New games will also tend to have extra issues, as can game launchers other then steam.

The deck makes up for that by being streamlined in plenty of other ways, so if you want the most console like experience then the steam deck is your option. It has resume on wake, it has a very streamlined ui, gamescope and mangohud built in, etc. If you want the best hardware and want all your games to work even if the interface is worse, then just get an ally.

And yes you can install Linux on the ally or Windows on the deck, I wouldn't bother with that though. Just get the device that best suites your needs.

I actually usually run linux on a USB SSD myself haha, but I am on a desktop so I can just leave it there. For you that's definitely a hassle.

Life is Strange games! More story then anything, and the dialog is a bit cringy these days but there's really no other games like it and I highly recommend them.

Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a secondary SSD to put Linux on instead of doing a traditional dual boot. Normal dual boots with windows suck ass and lead to problems.

As for a distro, I keep going back to endeavourOS. It's just so minimal out of the box, and I still can't find anything to match the convinience of the AUR + Pacman for package management.