My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
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’ve been installing Fedora Silverblue on family member’s computers. No complaints so far. They’re all non-technical users.
Likely either mint or popos
They tend to be the most liked by newcomers. Enough so that they don’t miss windows, or want to try something else a week later.
I think popos definitely deserves mention here. Cosmic has come a long way in a short time and the nvidia support is really helpful.
Debian
With Mate desktopConverted my non-tech wife to Mint without a single hiccup after her laptop crapped out - intuitive af for lifelong windows users - my kids will have never known another OS outside of their school issued chromebooks as they’re only just experiencing desktop environments
Bodhi!
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.
Hannah Montana Linux, obviously.
This is the only answer, regardless of the question.
My head tells me Linux Mint
my heart says listen to your head
My head tells me Linux Mint
Linux Mint is by far the smoothest experience I’ve had so far in trying Nobara, Debian, Manjaro otherwise.
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.
NixOS and tell them to figure it out.
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.
CachyOS, as it’s the one I’m using.
By installing it for them, I can only expect I’ll be also called upon to support it. Thus choosing the one I’m most familiar with right now.
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 was going to recommend a kubuntu lts, maybe help install flatpak support
