Tekdeb

Even Microsoft (probably) isn’t that stupid or desperate yet. What seems much more likely to me is that they will keep introducing AI features and more invasive ads gradually and making them opt-in or removable with the intention of making them mandatory later on.

I 100% believe that Microsoft fully understands that a lot of people aren’t happy with most of these changes, but profit must grow and they are elbow-deep in their AI gamble so they must keep pushing just slowly enough to avoid most users and businesses feeling like looking for alternatives is worth the effort. They are treading a fine line and are sometimes pushing too hard, but that in itself can be a solid negotiation tactic to manipulate people into accepting bad deals and my guess is that it’s fully intentional.

I’m not the one you’re asking, but I’m in a similar situation. I’ve attemped to get this working and the problem is that their Windows client must be downloaded and installed through the Microsoft Store and it’s packaged in a way you can’t run in standalone after extracting it. Some apps published through the MS Store do work fine this way, but I could not get it working for the Apple Music client.

Apple Music does have a web player, but it is also limited to lossy streaming like alternative clients like Cider is.

I would recommend Mint over PopOS if that ends up being the choice, but Bazzite is probably the safest choice here. Both Cinnamon and Plasma should be pretty easy to navigate for someone used to Windows. Nobara is great, but personally I would stay away from distros with so few maintainers (only GE?). GE is an amazing dev and has done some great things for gaming on linux, but the chance of having to switch distros sooner or later is fairly large. If you don’t mind helping them with that, then I don’t think you can go wrong with Nobara either. Personally I currently run CachyOS with KDE Plasma and it’s been super solid for my use case including gaming, but I would not recommend any Arch-based distros to “the kind of person who needs help if their TV is set to the wrong input” even if it is quite beginner friendly and stable. But I also keep Windows around on a separate drive regardless for the times when Linux isn’t the right tool for the job, most notably because a lot of competitive games do not run on linux as they require kernel level anti-cheat (https://areweanticheatyet.com/). If the person you are referring to have no interest in those kinds of games, then that becomes a non-issue, but if their favourite game is something like Valorant or Fortnite then Linux simply isn’t a good choice for them yet. That is also true for some Windows-exclusive applications. Most applications have good alternatives or can run fine through something like Bottles or Lutris, but some don’t.

Otherwise, most games typically work fine (https://protondb.com/). Some work flawlessly without having to do anything. Some only require minor tweaks like setting a launch parameter or selecting a specific proton version. Those I believe would be acceptable, if not perhaps a little frustrating for such a person, but there are also a lot of games that run but can have issues of varying degrees that you can’t do anything about. They are almost always good enough, but sometimes those issues can be significant. What I suspect would be a killer is that some games may stop working after an update which requires further tweaking or simply staying broken until either the game devs or proton devs fixes it.