So I successfully convinced my mom to change her laptop to Debian. I mean, the old W10 1909 is severely outdated, and yeah, the hard-disk is old so it is on the verge of failing.

At first, I booted into SpiralLinux KDE. At the time I didn't knew that the NVIDIA driver (for GeForce MX230) is not working. I was thinking "well after installing these I'll install nvidia-driver package like debian wiki said".

Turns out it's not as simple as that. It doesn't work. No matter how hard I try to tweak it, even going as far as installing manually from NVIDIA website, well, it still doesn't load.

I gave up. I couldn't find the culprit. So, I quickly downloaded iso of Linux Mint, which (they claimed) have a driver manager that can handle all NVIDIA stuff properly.

And yeah, it works. Just opening a GUI and selecting the package, and the next reboot, the NVIDIA driver works and even has a little applet for switching between Intel graphics for power saving (NVIDIA Optimus).

Now I understand why in one of interview Linus said "Fuck you NVIDIA". A real pain in the ass to get that card to work.