u/gottro4

Hello,

I have a surface book 1 that used to belong to my late father. It was the first computer I ever put Linux on actually. I first put Ubuntu on it, and it worked well actually, but I didn't like Ubuntu that much so I tried other distros on it. When I put OpenSUSE on it, it constantly used 100% of the the CPUs. I have since tried to put arch on it, but it refuses to see the wifi card. And with both, everything was tiny on the screen by default. I think I am missing something here with the setup on this device. What am I doing wrong that is causing this? Are there any distros that work better with the surface book?

I believe that 1. This is the relevant subreddit for my question and 2. My question follows the rules of this subreddit. If I am wrong on either of these accounts, please let me know. Any mistakes I have made are not out of malice, but out of ignorance.

Thank you for your time, have a great day!

Hello,

My brother is developmentally disabled. It is hard to explain exactly how he is if you haven't met him. He is 26 but at a mental level similar to a child. He can barely communicate, and often will just show me a device and say "fix it" and it's like pulling teeth to find out anything at all about what the problem is. He also gets really upset when technology breaks, sometimes to the point of full on meltdowns (which is not fun when it's someone with the muscle mass and size of 26 year old man). However, he is also in many ways intelligent; he is smart enough to be able to break technology in a lot of weird ways.

He recently showed me a laptop (a dell latitude e7470) and told me to fix it. It seems to be in used but in great shape, but the SSD has no os. I don't want to pay for windows, but I worry that if I put Linux on it he will meltdown at one of the many issues that come up in Linux. Is there any distro that is so beginner friendly that even someone with the mental level of a child can use it? I am considering possibly mint cinnamon or chrome os

Update: I decided on chromeos flex, it allows for parental controls and has the fewest chances to mess up his whole system. As far as I can tell, he only really uses computers to browse the internet anyway. thank you all for the help, have a great day