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You’re underestimating children. When I was around that age I had to fix my broken PC because nobody around me knew how to (parents didn’t care for Computers) and the next repair shop was far away.
My only support was some of the IT staff from School and books. I was setting up Windows 95 and making my own DOS boot floppies before I hit my teens, and I’m just the average working class person.
Even if you happen to use older NVidia cards from before they started doing signed firmware blobs the experience is miserable.
Nouveau has 0 dynamic power management, so the only way to change clocks speeds is via a debug interface in /sys/.
Everytime you change clock speeds the driver can crash. And while some software does become usable it tends to be very unstable because
some features are just not implemented or only half-implemented, leading to graphical glitches and unpredictable behaviour.
It’s a shame because I really feel like nouveau could be a great piece of software, but unfortunately nobody is working on it anymore.
I do this for a server in my LAN. I use DHCP+TFTP to boot grub over the network via PXE, and then grub boots the Kernel with the root pointing to a NFS share:
menuentry 'GNU/Linux NFS' --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
load_video
set gfxpayload=keep
insmod gzio
insmod part_msdos
insmod part_gpt
insmod fat
echo 'Loading kernel ...'
linux <TFTP Root>/vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs ip=dhcp nfsroot=<NFS Server IP>:/export/rootfs/<Root Dir> rw loglevel=6 threadirqs
}
Doing this makes managing that installation much easier. It’s just a directory that lives on the Main Server.
I don’t even need to boot the other Server to update the software in it, chroot is enough. And I don’t even have to worry about doing separate backups,
because I already back up the Main Server’s Storage regularly.
I’m on a machine w/ FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE right now and my AMD GPUs mostly work (minus some features like manual fan control or overclocking, also certain shaders may make the driver crash). They pull in the amdgpu driver code from Linux so you get the same experience for the most part. Bluetooth is very hit or miss in terms of drivers. (Also I find OSS to be better than any audio “solution” on Linux.)
I haven’t been able to get Steam to work reliably. It starts up fine the first time after a fresh install. But on any subsequent startup it just hangs indefinitely. I also haven’t messed with WINE since I don’t really have the need, but FOSS games/ports generally just work (OpenRCT2, OpenMW, Quake, Doom, 0ad, SuperTux, Wesnoth, Xonotic, etc.).
As with Linux distros, I just recommend installing it on a spare machine or drive to see if it works for you. Definitely consult the FreeBSD handbook for guidance though.
I hate how Desktop UI in general has been moving towards Mobile design for the last decade.
Everything has to always look like the latest shit from silicon valley, I despise it.
Imo all the work that was put into UI design for the last 20 years has been wasted effort.
I still use GNUStep and OpenMotif based Desktops because I genuinely think that those are better designed, and they haven’t been touched in forever.