Couldn’t find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it’s ok to ask here.
A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend’s kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can’t play Factorio.
For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can’t easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don’t spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn’t seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.
- Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
- Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
- Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn’t need to be “kid proof”, I don’t think he touches any stuff he doesn’t know what it does.
Bazzite:
- Fedora based, so newer libraries
- Atomic updates, therefore doesn’t break on updates
- Steam and Lutris are preinstalled
I’ve been using Fedora KDE on my own PC for a few years, but I’ve had some pretty severe breakages when updating. Though I suppose most of them happened because I had Cuda SDK installed, or monitor ICC profiles, but early on I also had Plasma crash on login while testing different themes. I’ll look more into Bazzite though!
The first point of bazzite and other atomic/immutable distros is to prevent such breakages. updates aren’t applied over your existing installed packages, the base read only part is updated and your layered packages come after if you even have any. A kid’s computer won’t need it though. Most of my installed software is flatpak, appimage, or brew. I have maybe 3 packages installed via rpm-ostree. If I ever need anything not possible this way it’s not a job for my gaming pc.
I have a kid about that age interested in games. There was definitely interest in social pressure to switch to Windows for gaming for the bigger selection and what friends were playing.
Sounds like SteamOS might work? https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/
Do you know how mature it is as a desktop OS? I saw the official FAQ does recommend against using it as such. I tried it on a HTPC a few years ago but at that point it didn’t seem very usable outside of Steam’s full screen UI.
There was some news about an updated one coming out soon for desktop. There was someone though on reddit that had put it on a pc, but of course still had some issues.
Windows lmao