Dual booting on separate drives is safe, especially if you unplug the windows drive while installing Linux so you can’t accidentally mix them up. Just don’t mess with the windows drive from Linux. It’s probably encrypted if you’re running windows 11 anyways.

Some MediaTek WiFi cards are not supported. I had to replace one in a laptop.

Mod Organizer 2 works great with wine and proton. Installation is a bit complicated though. The recent versions of MO2 require wine 9 or newer.

Edit from MS-DOS still came with Windows XP and I think it was in 7 too. Did they remove it in later versions?

I ran Damn Small Linux on it about 15 years ago. That worked pretty well and it would even run a web browser. It would probably boot Tiny Core Linux, but there wouldn’t be much RAM left to run any programs. The motherboard supports 128MB, but it’s not really worth the cost to upgrade it though.

I may see about resurrecting that computer. I’ve got an old Motorola police radio that I would like to reprogram to operate in the 2M ham band and I think that PC will run the programming software.

If you only need 2D, there is LibreCAD.

I’ve run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There’s not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.

The power usage will be a bit higher, but it will also have higher performance. They can have 2.5G ethernet and a couple of NVMe SSDs. The Raspberry Pi 5 only has one lane of PCIe 2.0, so it will be very bandwidth limited if you use a PCIe switch to connect a 2.5G NIC and an SSD.

There are also a lot of mini PCs that are comparable in price to a Raspberry Pi 5 once you factor in the cost of a case, SD card, and power supply for the Pi.

Make sure you have a font installed that supports emoji such as the Noto emoji font.

The game developers could if they wanted to, but I hope they won’t. I will not willingly install a rootkit on any of my computers. I wouldn’t buy or pirate a game that requires one even if it could run on Linux. I don’t even like running user level anti cheat, but at least that can be run in a sandbox.

If find the missed call notifications to be very helpful. I never remember to check my phone, but I’m on the computer all the time. I also like the ability to remote control the music player from my phone since the computer is hooked up to an amplifier with speakers in multiple rooms.

If you only have one slot, you can always put the old drive in a USB4 enclosure and turn it into a really fast flash drive.

I prefer to use FOSS software. There is a risk of getting malware from pirated software. Even if there is no malware, commercial software usually has lots of tracking and telemetry anyways.

I’ve got an old Motorola AMPS phone around somewhere that has a charging cradle that will fit either the whole phone or the battery on its own. Most commercial two way radios still work like that, I wish they would still make phones like that too.

The dual laptop batteries are handy too. I’ve got a Thinkpad T480 and it can hot swap the external battery. The high capacity battery lasts so long that you rarely need to swap it, but if you use the slim batteries, you will need a couple to get through a whole day. Unfortunately, that’s the last Thinkpad model that can hot swap batteries.

The touchscreen on my laptop works without having to configure anything. Mine doesn’t fold into a tablet, so I rarely use the touchscreen though.

I would suggest that you load Elementary OS or Ubuntu on a flash drive, boot it up and try it out. You don’t have to install anything, it will run right from the flash drive. That’s the best way to figure out if a distro works with your hardware.

It probably just needs some more RAM installed.

You can still get it from F-Droid. It’s a much better app store anyways. The google play store is mostly full of ad filled crap.

The only reason to have such fast internet at home is for torrents. Nothing else will saturate 10G, even with several people using it.

Yeah, if it requires kernel level access, I consider it malware. Not all anti cheat requires a rootkit and some even works on wine when the game developers allow it. It’s still not good for privacy, but at least you can play the game from a user account with limited access and keep your data safe.