If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.

They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

Okay I got another stupid question. You have everything going to the rear of the pc, but often times motherboards will have a riser to send audio to the front or top of the case so you can plug your headset in there. Do you have this facility and if so does running to it make any difference?

I may end up having to bow out but if I don’t get to keep trying to help: at some point you’ll need to fire up a daw or obs or jack or something to figure out if you can actually see the signal you’re dealing with anywhere.

The troubleshooting process I’m working through is more akin to what you’d do if you were at a big old mixing console trying to figure out why there’s no sound as opposed to the seemingly more obvious process of tracing device drivers and whatnot.

It’s been very helpful to me when troubleshooting sound issues “in the box”, so if you get stumped fiddlefarting around with lspci and whatnot, give it a shot from that side.

That’s great! What does kmix show?

This is gonna sound stupid, but plug and unplug your jack a few times with sound playing.

What does Kmix show?

E: actually before you check that, do the speakers play sound from the mac when plugged in to it directly?

I didn’t read all that too closely.

Do you have sound coming from the speakers plugged into the pc when you play a sound on the pc?

You have some good answers and some bad answers here.

It’s not the fault of the people answering, what you’re asking has been piecemeal and scattershot in implementation over the last decade so everyone has some bizarre response they came up with to be happy.

Allow me to share mine: use a kvm switch.

The switch lets you plug two computers into one keyboard, video, and mouse. But you’re gonna just use the video part. Plug it into both your motherboards and gpus video ports and push the button to switch back and forth between the gpu for gaming and the motherboard for everything else.

Why only gaming? Because everything else you reference can make use of a gpu that’s not being used for video. I guess some game engines support rendering frames and then sending them to another output device but that’s not something to rely on.

So when you’re using blender you see the model on your monitor plugged into the motherboard but the heavy lifting is done by the gpu. When you transcode a video the same thing happens.

I came to this solution after trying to do what you’re asking for in x11 and having a bunch of headaches about it everytime an update would come down.

Pushing a little button on the desktop was easier than messing around with software to make a rube Goldberg contraption to do the same thing. Mine had two leds on either side to indicate which “computer” I was using at the time. I ended up wrapping electrical tape around the rim to cover them both up and cut out the word “turbo” from the tape over the green led that indicated I was looking at the gpu.

If you’re mechanically inclined and can work with small parts, the old Sony branded walkmans are generally good quality and have a decent supply of replacement parts. Some of the new portables have awful wow and flutter that will make it seem like that two step is a polyrhythm!

I listen on my phone in the world, cd and tape when I’m driving and on whatever at home. Today it was goat and escape-ism.

Consider 0patch before you give up on windows. They do good work and it’s real affordable.

No matter what you do, in this circumstance it’s worth keeping that windows partition around.

I do think whatever you use is the right choice though.

E: I looked up the 0patch pricing and you get a year of patches for a bunch of eol versions of windows like 7 and 10 for $25 a year. It’s a good deal I think for people who don’t want to or can’t upgrade to 11, and they beat Microsoft to a bunch of zero day exploits.

I know you said it’s a no money kind of situation but I really think when ten is still a possibility theres two bucks and some change a month in the budget.

If you can figure out how to make a Debian usb installer without help then you’ll be fine.

Does she want this?

If so then just set her up exactly what you have so you can easily help when there’s a problem.

If not then get her the computer she actually wants.

None of that matters.

You need experience, not recommendations.

Install anything and play with it to learn.

If you will not go forward without a recommendation, Debian is fine and anything you learn will generally transfer to other distributions.

I was gonna say pit vipers but they’re American.

You should get some vipes anyway, they make a safety rated ballistic pair.

Once I had a pair bought from someone on eBay break on me and they just wanted to confirm there was a joke written on the frame before sending a replacement pair for free. I think I had to pay shipping or something but standing behind an eBay purchase from a third party is cool.

You’ll fit right in.

What do you like to listen to and what do you like to listen on?

You’re posting in the internet right now. I suggested that you tell people you are trying to get away from computers

For the purposes of the average person the tech guy in your op is absolutely 100% correct.

All the platforms listed use transport encryption and that’s enough to avoid mitm surveillance which is enough for most people.

Most people’s “threat model” is the police or a pi. All the apps listed including signal have to comply with orders from American police and have “sidechain attacks” that involve stuff like getting some member of the groupchat’s device and scrolling up or tricking someone into giving up sensitive information.

I would recommend people not do that unless they know they need to and again, if you know you need to you’re not asking on lemmy.

Hosting your own secrets not only puts the burden of protecting, providing access to and preserving the secrets entirely on you, but puts a very unique set of hosting goals squarely on you as well.

Even a skilled administrator with significant resources at hand would often be better served by simply using bitwarden instead of hosting vaultwarden.

An example I used in another thread about password managers was a disaster. When your local server is inoperable or destroyed and general local network failure makes your cloud accessible backup unreachable, can you access your secrets safely from a public computer at the fire department, church or refugee center?

Bitwarden works well from public computers and there’s a whole guide for doing it as safely as possible on their website.

Yes, but the bios will still need to go to the device with the bootloader on it for you to make the choice.

In the case that the external is unplugged or had a damaged wire or something, it won’t work.

Depending on your circumstances you may be better served by just installing Linux on the external device, not writing grub (the bootloader that lets you choose) to your internal drive and instead just booting from it like a usb.

I don’t generally recommend that to people, but if you absolutely will not use partitions no matter what then it’s a less complex way of accomplishing some tasks.

E: I want to be clear that you are setting yourself up for failure and unhappiness if you try to use a usb device chain booted off grub. You will make your life incredibly complex and make it hard to get help if you try to migrate that setup to your boot device.

It is infinitely easier to move your files to the external and dual boot from partitions on one device like a normal person.

Why do you want to use a vm or boot from your usb drive in the first place?

Bitwarden.

You know if you need more than that and if you’re asking on lemmy you don’t need more than that.

Here’s a post explaining how dual booting works.

When you turn on your computer, the bios or bios equavalent goes down its list of devices to try and boot from. It might have usb or cd first and ssd next, so if you put a cd or usb it’ll boot that automatically.

Devices that can be booted have special instructions in the first part of their storage that can be used to operate the hardware.

When the bios finds a device that can be booted it hands the hardware off to that device and breathes a sigh of relief, most of its work is over. That devices work is just beginning though.

If it finds a windows disk, that disks bootloader will load a minimal set of hardware drivers necessary to load the rest of windows and it builds itself up towards having a functional running windows operating system and presents a login screen to the user.

If it finds a Linux disk, the disks bootloader will do the same thing but instead of loading a set of drivers, kernel and configuration that let it start a windows system it will build towards having a running Linux system. Duh.

When you dual boot, the device the bios finds to boot from doesn’t do either of those things, it runs a bootloader that presents you the user with a choice between the two, then hands the task off to one or the other based on your choice.

Setting up dual booting means clearing off space and shrinking the windows partition so you can have a Linux partition, installing Linux to it and then installing a bootloader that gives you the option to use either os.