My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
Debian. I want that thing to be so stable they forget they ever had problems.
My head tells me Linux Mint
my heart says listen to your head
My head tells me Linux Mint
Head says Linux Mint
Heart says listen to the head
Tiling WM Arch
There is a good reason Mint is recommended as the no nonsense beginner distro. For someone more technical and willing to learn I might recommend Fedora.
One you get past those two distros you are pretty much in the realm where someone should be technical enough to choose their own distro and know what that means.
I’m on maybe an old version of Mint at work and it is kind of miserable.
Icons don’t work right, the panel is weird, the software center is not very easy to use.
I’m hoping that new versions are better.
Hannah Montana Linux, obviously.
This is the only answer, regardless of the question.
Nah fucking hit em with the temple os.
Arch, no gui. Let 'em rawdog it from the CLI
Linux from scratch you mean?
Gentoo FTW. Just give them a bootable USB key.
Pfff, when I was young we didn’t have package managers. You have it too good.
Back in my day we programmed with punch cards!
You had a punch? We had to lick the holes into steel plates.
Linux Mint is by far the smoothest experience I’ve had so far in trying Nobara, Debian, Manjaro otherwise.
At my work, I convinced my boss to let us use Linux on a couple machines and, you guessed it: Mint. Everyone pretty much knows where to find things and it’s stable as a rock.
Mint, without question. A polished, conservative, stable experience with Ubuntu’s broad compatibility baked in, and a familiar desktop experience. Few other distributions can deliver that. I’m very technical myself, but past the age of wanting to tinker with every little thing; I jist want an OS that is stable and gets out of my way to let me get things done - and Mint delivers.
What is the persons skill level and are both of you OK with you picking up the slack?
She’s a pretty proficient windows user who mentioned looking at kbuntu. She can probably handle some rough edges on her own, but I have no interest in long term support. So probably mint 🤣
I use kubuntu. It’s a good choice for people who don’t have experience but are able and willing to search for answers.
KDE defaults are solid and utilizes a lot of Windows muscle memory, and being based on Ubuntu means that it’s really easy to search for answers on virtually any question you might have. Plus widespread package support
Whichever one you wind up with, Dolphin as a file manager blows the monstrosity that windows has out of the water. For someone who’s eeked out some power/efficiency out of windows usage it should be very pleasant finding out the standard software available for Linux these can almost always make you more efficient with less effort.
I was going to recommend a kubuntu lts, maybe help install flatpak support
Bazzite for young people, Mint for old people would be my first thought
OK I’m nearly 40 but you don’t gotta remind me I’m old 🤣
I’d put LMDE on it, the familiarity of Mint with the stability of Debian and no fucking snaps.
Whenever this question comes up, I think the distro is less important than the desktop environment. If they feel more comfortable in Windows, go with something that provides KDE. If Mac, go with Gnome. Once they get used to it, let them go through the rite of passage that is distro hopping.
That said, and I know everyone recommends Mint or Ubuntu, and they’re fine, but you could do better. I like the immutable distros for people who just want to use their computer without thinking about it. They aren’t able to mess with anything important that keeps the computer running, and as long as they restart the computer, it’s always up to date. It’s like a Chromebook, which is the level most people are with computers.
I would definitely choose Linux Mint 100% :p
I started off with it and its learning curve wasn’t too steep. It uses Calamares for installation, features a built-in app store, and is very familiar to those coming from Windows.
especially for new converts (or those that do not know what an OS is)… the curated store of applications makes it very easy to push people away from microsoft.
If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.
