I am hesitant to offer too much advice, but, Hyperbola is somewhat more difficult then trisquel. I would be aware of this just in case it gets a little tricky. Find out what he needs from software if you don't already, if you do and you still think it is a good idea,

then just remember .deb packages don't work on Hyperbola. compiling for source or repo are the options. 

But yeah, if this is all fine, then by all means feel free.

Anyways though, I hope someone will reply further if this is what you want.

Thanks, Pekman. Nobody needs a leech and we're really too small to handle but so much tmi drama, but he might genuinely be more comfortable here than he was with the Trisquel and Ubuntu forums.

Zapper and I have a history and he is absolutely correct about it being a big friendship issue and a small technical one. I don't want to doom my musician friend to a lifetime of "calling the computer guy" but on the other hand, I appreciate being handed a twelve string acoustic guitar when I asked him to plug me into "auto-tune" but all I really wanted to do was jam.

I think he mostly uses Audacity and surfs the web, emails his kids, and all the usual stuff people who aren't musicians do with their Windows or Ubuntu boxes but he deserves better and he's a darned good old school guitarist and used to be an even better saxophonist back in the 20th century when owning a saxophone wasn't completely out of the reach of average musicians who support themselves with their day jobs.

The whole band would be better off if we lost the "self-deprecating sense of humour" and gave them the credit for having enough intelligence to learn how to compile from source the same way Zapper never gave up on me when I didn't know why I was having so much trouble installing Hyperbola in the first place.

I wasn't. I just didn't know that command isn't "startx" like it was on Debian, it's "startx /usr/bin/my-WM-or-DE" or even that the executable for xfce4 isn't "xfce4" at all, it's "xfce4-session" and I didn't know how to tell him until I figured it out for myself. I don't want a graphical log in. That wasn't the solution to the actual problem any more than "just tell him you don't have time any more" is to the problem of what to do about my musician friend's computer.

I think he will be fine technically from what I've seen of the stability and even some beloved "oldie moldie goldies" here like Emelfm2, which I thought I was going to have to give up after Trisquel 7's EOL, and even a media player I haven't used since the schism between D* Small Linux and Tinycore in 2007-2008ish.

My honest impression of the install process, now that I know what my problem was, is that it wasn't particularly difficult for an intermediate user  and the documentation was excellent other than possibly mentioning that multilib needs to be enabled in pacman.conf on the 64 bit install. I've literally never succeeded installing a pacman based distro before.

The misunderstanding about the graphical log-in screen is just a cosmic joke to me or perhaps a higher power's sbenevolent sense of humour to others---a reminder not to give up, but to use clear, concrete language to describe a problem when asking for or offering help. It's sometimes harder to do that with people who share the same language and some but not all of the same culture. Most people use graphical log-in screens these days and i didn't think my personal preference was worth mentioning, much less the source of the whole problem.

And yea, I've accidentally offended by "acting like my $20 eBay liquidator laptop is better than their new $2,000,000 iThing" because it is. I wish I had better people skills and could communicate clearly that an offer to help is just that, not some sort of an insult.

Exactly.

I'm not a gamer but I do know enough about gaming culture to spot obvious bullshit, have a great deal of respect for the Minetest developers, and understand that the game grew out of something that was as iconic to the people who grew up with Minecraft and Stampy Longnose as a novel, movie, or television series would have been to a similar aged person growing up in the 20th century.

Money isn't enough motivation to work on crap like mainstream laptops any more; I only trade for music lessons, lol.