Lot of people hating on Garuda here, but I have loved it. Hopefully it goes as smoothly for you as it has for me - it's been an absolute breath of fresh air. :)
I don't know how common it is anymore, but it definitely was a few years back. You knew a computer was infected with everything when you saw a stupid cartoon dinosaur or something as the mouse cursor as soon as the pc booted to windows... I think it was more about what was bundled in the download from scummy websites doing the damage though, not the actual cursor files. I still cringe though if I see a non-standard cursor in windows, like PTSD-esque flashbacks...
I'd bet it is a typo stating ddr5, not on the CPU model. 8GB sticks of ddr5 are rare enough to find as singles, and 4gb sticks basically don't exist - makes more sense if it is a DDR3 system. Plus, the GT 730 is basically only barely a graphics card, a lot of them are Fermi based chips (like gt 400 series from 2010)... They are dirt cheap video output for a machine that otherwise wouldn't have any video out, but they get packaged by less than honest companies/people with other old hardware and marketed as "gaming computers" all the time unfortunately.
Ubuntu is not the limiting factor to this machine gaming, unfortunately. It is going to be choking itself on basically any games from the last 10 years :(
Clunker really doesn't come close to the cars it referenced though. Not trying to defend it's use, I understand what everyone is talking about here. There really is no good replacement word though, which is frustrating. Like, that entire era of car culture came and went before many of us involved knew the word was racist (or at least before we were mature enough to care).
That might make sense if they were posting pictures of PS1 era Lara Croft, but they aren't, they always use the newest examples... They would show a bigger gap in time passed if they used the dragonborn from the initial release of skyrim vs the newest remastered version.
"now now, calm down everyone. Let's see what the Orphan-Crushing Machine really does before we start getting upset. Just because it is fully capable of (and seems exclusively designed to) crush all orphans doesn't mean it is actually going to crush ALL the orphans. Probably just a few orphans really."
There is a reason Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago that it is so easy to install and use Windows without paying for a key. You can STILL use any old windows 7 key you have to active windows 10 and 11. You can use the OS nearly in it's entirety (as far as home users are concerned) without even doing that. It is because Windows is no longer Microsoft's biggest product, the user is.
The animosity shown towards them (even though it can be justified) is making the problem worse not better.
This falls into basically the same trap that climate change has been in for decades. PR campaign to make individual people feel bad about a problem that is ultimately created and made worse by the very small number of people in power. Nothing we can do will make it better. The people in power are actively trying to make it worse, because it helps them strengthen their power. But convince the individuals at the bottom that it is their fault and that they can fix it if they just wanted to, and suddenly none of the focus is on the real problem.
Those people are stupid. It is getting worse. That is how the powerful want all of us to be.
I'd recommend looking up Ventoy and getting a big thumb drive (like 64gb or so). Then you can download several different distro live images and put them all on one flash drive and try them all out in a live environment. It isn't 100% the experience you'll get running it installed on the machine, but you can get a decent feel for each distro to see what you like and what you don't without having to keep track of 5-10 different flash drives.
The problem is we've already kinda seen what that brings to the industry through mobile gaming, and it's been universally terribly not just for mobile but for the entire gaming industry.
I dunno, maybe this would be different, but to me it is just another test-bed of innovating new ways to dick down the consumers that will eventually spread to the rest of the world again.
Lord, you've gone through more phones than covid has new strains. I'm still using the Galaxy s9 I got in 2018. It replaced the Pixel that I hated for being an iphone knock-off (up to including the poor longevity of the device...). I've heard the newer Pixels have gotten better, but the first couple generations really hurt and I'm not sure I could give them another chance. I'm scared to replace my current phone, actually, because it's the first smart phone since the Palm Pre (I loved that thing) that I didn't find myself hating within the first six months of ownership.