If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.

They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

Okay I got another stupid question. You have everything going to the rear of the pc, but often times motherboards will have a riser to send audio to the front or top of the case so you can plug your headset in there. Do you have this facility and if so does running to it make any difference?

I may end up having to bow out but if I don’t get to keep trying to help: at some point you’ll need to fire up a daw or obs or jack or something to figure out if you can actually see the signal you’re dealing with anywhere.

The troubleshooting process I’m working through is more akin to what you’d do if you were at a big old mixing console trying to figure out why there’s no sound as opposed to the seemingly more obvious process of tracing device drivers and whatnot.

It’s been very helpful to me when troubleshooting sound issues “in the box”, so if you get stumped fiddlefarting around with lspci and whatnot, give it a shot from that side.

That’s great! What does kmix show?

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This is gonna sound stupid, but plug and unplug your jack a few times with sound playing.

What does Kmix show?

E: actually before you check that, do the speakers play sound from the mac when plugged in to it directly?

I didn’t read all that too closely.

Do you have sound coming from the speakers plugged into the pc when you play a sound on the pc?

Some distributions have that. Some have it built into the tools like arch. For some you just boot your installation media and run only the “install bootloader” step.

About the only universal way is to boot usb, pivot-root or chroot to switch to the installed system you wanna run and do grub-install, although you need to understand a few things about your system to not make errors.

Once you pick something to stick with, go ahead and look up its process. Think of it like practicing changing a tire in the grocery store parking lot before you actually need to do it on the side of the road.

No that doesn’t keep windows from changing anything.

Just learn how to repair your bootloader how your distribution wants it done and you’ll be fine.

It doesn’t matter.

None of that matters.

You need experience, not recommendations.

Install anything and play with it to learn.

If you will not go forward without a recommendation, Debian is fine and anything you learn will generally transfer to other distributions.