Then it's not even a year old. The things that see the most movements performance wise are focused on AMD and NVidia. I'm not convinced there will be a huge difference between what he measured then and what you would measure today. If you are comparing that card with a newer one, the latter will probably get better performance. If the difference in performance is worth the difference in price, only you can decide
My point is, the last time Phoronix did a review on b580, 9600 was not even on the graph yet. When it comes to gaming hardware on Linux, I don't know of any better place than Phoronix. He does the tests really using a Linux box, really running games (or computing) and sometimes even runs tests again when there is some big release of Mesa etc.
But when trying to decide which generation to buy you most probably have to glue together how the thing you are eyeing compares to the other thing, by comparing both to another one that is present in both comparisons
How possible is that they will be needing some bleeding edge update of WINE or kernel?
If you think you can expect that they won't need to do bleeding edge updates, pick something that is easy to use for you and just choose a WM that will be easy for them
My grandma and mom use Manjaro with XFCE. Or rather they use XFCE, I use Manjaro on their PCs ;D. They don't need to update to, for example, NTSync enabled version ASAP, so it's fine with me just doing an update during some holidays for grandma and over the phone for mom.
We used to try Mint for their boxes. I was banging my head against it as always with Debian based distros and the effect was that for them the downtimes were longer. Despite our mutual hopes, mom never really got self-sufficient with managing the OS. Even with GUI based package manager. So I just migrated them to Manjaro and now we are all happier. For me the updating is less painful and is faster, for them it just works
But if you would need to educate such user on how to use some package manager to update something, then maybe there might be some differences between GUI package managers that might help you
although
for someone who doesn't know how to do much more than check their email and log in to Steam
I think it will be you doing the updating in the end
In context of bees isn't the trim important? I mean, for the grass to have flowers for the pollinators, shouldn't it be untrimmed? And hence prone to inviting ticks?
Wine can work in a pinch but I wouldn't rely on it
In this case I would say the other way round. Proton works in a container, so getting to the sound interface for example might be harder than just using Wine
I haven't been paying attention to GPU market lately, are you actually asking about 9060?
In such case, it seems this is the review you might be looking for