No worries :) everyone starts somewhere.

The other commenter covered the terminology so to your point about being on Nvidia:

I know we don’t like Reddit but here. Seems to be YMMV and you’ll never know if you don’t try. Also possible that the things that are buggy aren’t things you use/care about

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

FWIW I run Ubuntu and do some gaming. Haven’t hit any issues, and I’ve run multiple AAA games on release (TLOU, Indiana Jones, Hogwarts Legacy, GoW 2018) as well as other, lighter, titles like Cities Skylines 2, Asetto Corsa, Project Cars, American Truck Simulator

I’m sure there are bugs that I haven’t experienced, and my system is probably newer/higher performance than the average person + i chose parts with Linux in mind. But based on my experience, I wouldn’t tell someone to jump into a less user friendly distro because of problems I myself haven’t run into. Much better to try one, see if you hit an issue, then jump rather than doing the hard one up front

Consider your library: most games will be able to run fine on Linux. However, if you predominantly play online multiplayer games which require anticheat you should check compatibility on ProtonDB.

Second, consider your hardware: if your GPU is AMD you’re good to go. Nvidia might have issues (not sure if this has been resolved since I last had to look into it).

Finally, choose a distro: I’d recommend Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu-based. There’s a lot of mixed answers in the Linux community and definitely a ton of hate for Ubuntu. However, as someone who has been running Linux for nearly a decade at this point, there are a few key points:

1. Ubuntu is debian based, so it’s extremely stable(but not as slow to update)

2. Ubuntu is very beginner friendly, and you won’t need to touch the terminal if you don’t want to

3. Everyone hates on snaps, but for you I don’t think you’ll run into an issue with it.

Personally, I steer towards debian based distros for my devices as well because I’d rather spend time messing with the software I’m running or other things NOT debugging why my config is suddenly shitting the bed

Okay so I’ll try my best to convey what I know (I studied DFIR in college, but I work as a security engineer now):

There are two types of mobile device forensic acquisitions/collections/extractions: BFU and AFU.

BFU (Before first unlock) extractions simply refer to what Cellebrite is able to pull from the phone when it has been turned on but not unlocked for the first time, similarly AFU (after first unlock) is what it can collect after its been unlocked.

You can think about this as your phone being in two states: when you first boot it up (and I’m talking from the Android perspective, because I have never owned an iPhone) you’re required to use your pin/password to unlock the device and then it will complete its boot. Any time after that first unlock though, you can unlock with stuff like biometrics and its much faster (i know my phone when i unlock for the first time after a boot will display an “Android is Starting” or something like that while it loads up).

Bringing this back to your main question: depending on the OS version and device, what is pulled from AFU/BFU will vary. So looking at the image you linked:

If you were an incident responder, you’d probably read this chart left to right. Lets say i have a Samsung S23 running presumably android 13 or 14, I’d first look at the samsung rows, choose the second one for the version, and then id have to determine if the device is in BFU or AFU mode, and see which options are available to me. In this instance, it doesn’t make a difference because I can get user data from either (because i can brute force the password on the lockscreen for this specific device). Otherwise, a BFU extraction might only pull out surface level information from the device because everything may not have been decrypted yet.

I feel like I’m rambling but I hope it’s shedding some light, your point about the password is important but not everything. Companies like Cellebrite and Magnet pay a lot of money for zero day vulns that they can build exploits for into their software, meaning that if theres something critical (like a pin code bypass) then they could just use that and get all your data. But, there’s a lot of various data on cellphones, take Signal for example (and this is just an example, I don’t actually know): it’s possible that if signal is encrypting messages stored on the device, that even if an examiner pulled that database out, they might still not be able to do anything about it.

My final point, there’s also a high degree of secrecy around these tools. Obviously Cellebrite and Magnet are incentivised to keep their exploits quiet so they continue working, otherwise Google or Apple could just issue a security patch and render them useless. Often, they’ll have different tools that are available to different organizations: a company may have a few cellebrite dongles for internal investigations and litigation support, the details of which are kept under NDA, but they’re still likely to be separate from what an organization like the FBI would have access to. This is why it’s often hard to find information on these tools, especially updated or recent information

I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn’t use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).

If this helps them to do that, then so be it