So I got my mom a new laptop for Christmas and decided to turn her 6 year old one into an Ubuntu machine.
Any good software or games that you might suggest?
I experiment and play retro games on my Chromebook with a ubuntu chroot running parallel. Chromebooks are not powerful machines but all of these run well. Got mine on an impulse cyber monday buy
- battery lasts forever, 1920x1080, weighs 2 pounds or so. If you chroot it, a chromebook is well worth it (must have intel chip).
Dosbox - colonization, xcom
Diablo 1 with wine
Wing commander Privateer - Gemini gold remake (this one of the best games ever and the graphics for spaceflight are pretty modern in this remake)
http://privateer.sourceforge.net/files.shtml
Steam games: hotline miami and xenonauts (indie xcom remake A+). both are opengl games
some of the other random software that I also have on there
eclipse
zoom (pretty good im client, does video and works decent on linux)
rdesktop to RDP to windows machines
gimp
claws mail
wine
Fair warning: there are tons of dependencies needed for a lot of this. Some of this is really manual. Google is your friend.