This should just be working if it’s standard USB audio; I’d recommend just researching issues with USB headphones in general. Maybe also try another cable.
If nothing works, it looks like you can use a double 3.5mm cable on this model, which pretty much every large retailer with an electronics section should have.
Debian Stable. Get it installed, get everything working right and configured the way this person likes it on a reasonable DE with default themes, and more likely than not, you won't have to touch this thing for years.
The setup's not necessarily for noobs, but if you're the one doing the setup, you should be able to get it into a place where it will pretty much never break for them.
You should probably give them KDE or GNOME (probably KDE, as it's more Windows-like and less my way or the highway than Gnome). As much as I love XFCE, it's probably a good idea to give a layman a feature-heavy DE so that nothing is likely to be missing; also, it's way too easy to accidentally delete panel items or entire panels on accident and a little annoying to restore things back to the way they were. KDE's panels implementation mitigates these issues.
I remember my 1st Surface Go’s microSD card reader being pretty good.
I think you’re mixing up Office 365 and Office Online.
Office 365 is a subscription for Microsoft Office that includes access to both the full, more powerful desktop Office applications and the much less powerful Office Online.
Though I don’t think it’s even called Office 365 anymore, but I don’t respect MS enough to bother to Google what they’re calling it now.
What model Thinkpad was it? Just curious.
Part of me wants to plug Thinkpad E16 as the cheapest new laptop you can get away with, but if the trackpad is the same one that drives you insane. Honestly, I don’t really care about the trackpad because I exclusively use Trackpoint.
Also, I would call the speakers mediocre, but honestly, I rarely listen to audio on my laptop, so they may be total crap.
FYI, 14” is sort of the new 13.3”. A lot of newer 14” laptops are the about size of an older 13.3” laptop, but just have less bezel.
Same situation as with 16” vs 15.6”.
AMD GPUs are officially supported in the Linux kernel and Mesa. They pretty much just work out of the box with minimal setup on a fresh distro install.
NVidia GPUs often require out-of-tree proprietary drivers to work with full performance; these drivers are often a pain to install and update. Supposedly, things are getting less terrible now, but NVidia is still overall more likely to cause you pain than AMD.
Intel Arc dGPUs, like AMD, have decent native kernel and Mesa support from what I can tell, but tend to have worse performance than AMD. However, I hear they’re ridiculously good for video encoding!
Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.
Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.
Do note that the yt-dlp version in stable will go out of date; I recommend installing it from the backports repo so it keeps updating.
I also use XFCE. My desktop’s currently on Forky and went through all of Trixie, and the emdia keys have worked fine.
I’ll have to fiddle around and see what’s going on, though it may take a few days to get back because I’m starting school again soon, so I’m quite busy.
For reference, what programs do you tend to use with media keys? For instance, VLC, Firefox, etcetera.
External drives? Usually on most distros and file managers, it’s just one click.
I have had a bit of a horrid time with Bluetooth, though, especially when it comes to audio. However, I will say Linux allows you to do some nuts things with Bluetooth like emulate a Nintendo Switch controller with NXBT, allowing you to use a PlayStation controller on a Switch with a spare laptop.
As for audio, I feel like life has gotten much better for the layman since Pipewire.
I don’t think VR setups are that common, and the Venn diagram of VR owners and Linux users has to be even smaller. I’ve probably only known 2 people who actually own a headset, and both of them were standalone Oculus affairs.
Overall, I feel like it’s possible to conceptually understand Linux and which config file is while, while Windows registry is an incomprehensible beast. Also, it feels like Linux tends to have better errors that correlate to a specific problem, whereas the same Windows error could be caused by many different things and lead you on a wild goose chase through forum posts filled with generic advice and dead ends.