Yeah, this is what might be the final outcome

If i say give me a phone and they say “no, come into the office instead of working from home”, I will produce an old phone faster than ya ckuld blink lol

Aw shit, this sucks because my company uses this authentication method.

I guess when the change finally happens I’ll just be saying ‘you owe me a phone for this’. Absolutely no way i am going back to Android just for this on my personal phone.

One possible workaround is to add more options to your security info in your work account. For example, I added my number and also a specific password as an option last year when I moved onto Graphene and had to update that info. Would that be an option?

Unsure if that would even work or if those options are more for account recovery (when no longer have access to a specific device)

Since you specifically mentioned gaming and streaming, a great option for you as a beginner is Nobara.

It is built specifically for gaming and streaming and has many of the tools pre-installed and makes DaVinci Resolve setup really easy (is a challenge otherwise lol). It’s based on Fedora, heavily modified kernel for performance and makes Fedora ready for gaming out of the box (which is why I discourage Fedora for gaming as a beginner, that takes a lot of set up for gaming and nvidia).

Nobara is also great for beginners because it comes with some brilliant GUI options - apps that let you click onto the specific drivers, packages you might need and the Welcome app includes options step by step of what to install. You will mostly use such an app for updates, so it takes away a lot of the fear of the terminal (but you can still use no problem). It also includes some great options for streaming apps you’ll need.

Also comes with KDE as its main suggestion (Nobara version of it or pure KDE, very little difference, basically the same with a few extra Nobara icons added i think). KDE is a fantastic DE, the workflow is similar to Windows out of the box and you won’t be unfamiliar with it, great one to start with. Plus its so customisable so you can get it looking very different from windows if you wish (which i did with mine).

They have a great Discord too if you wanna ask any questions about specific games or issues. It’s basically Fedora but gentler learning curve and everything you need ready to go out of the box

I bought a laptop very similar (same model group but from the year after) to this just before Christmas for my niece. Got it 2nd hand, as my brother was just looking a laptop that she could browse on and maybe do some homework.

I refurbished it and got it cleaned up and I tried lubuntu, xubuntu, linux mint xfce and one other (forget now). Same thing kept happening. Would simply freeze when trying to boot them. Had removed Secure Boot too.

After couple days of trying I ended up giving up and going with a Windows 10 LTSC IoT version from Massgrave for her.

Wish I had better news or something more productive for you. Sorry!