Since you are going the dual boot route, I highly recommend that you keep the OS’s on separate drives and never use systemd, or GRUB boot for windows, ie always switch your boot order in your uefi. This is mainly because there are countless formatting and system repair issues with using one drive, and regardless of where the OS’s are, windows has a strong tendency to overwrite your Linux bootloader.

I also do some video/photo stuff, which don’t have Linux-native versions. I use Affinity (v2 and the newly-released version), Magix Vegas, and Wondershare Filmora. I don’t know if it’d be possible to run any of them in a virtual machine or something. I have tried the Linux-native alternatives, and while they have their merits, I won’t be able to use them as full replacements.

The unfortunate thing is if this is non-negotiable, I think this will kill your Linux dreams at the moment. At the moment, the only ways I know how to run these well is on a VM with GPU pass through which is a pain for people who have tinkered with Linux for ages and damn near system breaking for the average user.

Now, perhaps unusually for a newbie, when it comes to wanting something I’m familiar with, I’m actually not bothered by having an envirnment which resembles Windows. In fact, I think it’d probably be a plus if the distro does things differently. It’s fun to try different things, and if someone’s genuinely thought “this is a better way of doing this”, then I’m happy to give it a go. As long as there’s decent documentation. I’m not allergic to the idea of the terminal or otherwise having to use typed commands (I have a Raycast-ish-like app on Windows which I use to launch apps and search for files, for example), but I’m also not very experienced with that and would need very good, very newbie-friendly documentation.

If the previous part isn’t a deal breaker, based upon this part of your post, I would highly recommend running endeavor os or cachy os which are both run on an arch base. My preferred of the two is endeavor since it is essentially just a base arch install without the hassle that is installing arch. Using one of these distros will require you to familiarize yourself with the package manager pacman and the aur wrapper that they use, but that is the extent of CLI interaction that is needed. This will allow you to have a hassle free install while having the tinkering capabilities that arch is known for, just don’t touch anything that requires sudo without making sure you understand what it is doing.

I think you got your groups a little mixed up,

America: invades foreign countries and kills innocent people.

Mentally ill warhawks: it’s for a valid reason we swear!

China: has military presence just outside of its borders.

Freedom conscious people: OMG guys the evil communist dictators are going to destroy the world!!

There’s quite a bit of overlap with these groups and liberals, but I wouldn’t say liberals in general hold these opinions.

Based upon your wording, I am assuming your father is not particularly tech savvy, if this is the case first and foremost you should be picking a distro that is maintained by a large group of trustworthy developers, this removes the niche distros from the running. Secondly, since he isn’t going to want to learn the terminal, you should be picking a distro that installs programs with a GUI package manager or flatpak manager, this removes the likes of arch, gentoo, & open suse tumbleweed. Thirdly, you will want a distro that is based on one you understand well enough to run tech support, I don’t know which that is for you, if it is Debian based stick with mint, fedora based go with fedora workstation or fedora KDE, if it is opensuse I don’t have any recommendations sorry.

After you select the distro you need to educate your dad that he should only be getting new programs through the package manager, and I would either tell him the inherit insecurity of some flatpaks or remove flathub from your mirror list unless there is something he really needs in which case you need to do your research.

In general security on Linux is a lot more active for IT than it is for Windows, but for the general user if they can get by using a well known distro’s repos you shouldn’t have any security issues.

If you are overly worried you could add apparmor to the system to isolate the system from programs or pick an immutable distro like bazzite, but in general the immutables are smaller teams which is why I don’t prefer them.

You seem to be a bit more advanced than I am, I have only ever used kritas version of smart objects, & perspective distort, but I don’t know about the others you mentioned.

The only one I’m aware of requires a GPU with 6Gb of vram, which sadly I do not have, I would very much like a background removal utility that is run locally

The only one I’m aware of requires a GPU with 6Gb of vram, which sadly I do not have, I would very much like a background removal utility that is run locally

Don’t forget krita, as far as I am concerned they have feature parity with Photoshop, so long as you have no interest in ai features