So i was surprised today when my fiancee told me she was thinking about switching over to linux. Surprised because she is absolutely not technically minded, but also because she was weary about having Microsoft AI slop forced on her PC every update. ( i’m so proud!)
Now i’ve used a little linux but i’ve always been a holdout. Won’t stop me from moving someone else over but i have too much going on in my setup to deal with that right now. So i’m not super versed but i was able to give her the basic rundown of what distros are, concerns when switching, what may and may not be available, shes still on board so we’re doing this! Knowing her she would like to not have to transition too much, whats something fairly hands off and easy to learn. I’ve heard some good things about mint from hanging around you nerds the past few years but also some not so good things, any suggestions?
next concern is what kind of transfer process is this going to be? i have some spare HDD’s so we can try and get everything ported over but i’m so busy with school right now i can’t quite allocate the time to really deep dive this.
Any help is appreciated, cheers!
Mint
Even as an EndeavourOS user, I concur: Mint. Why? Cinnamon is hands down the best desktop environment. Beginner friendly default without blasting features in one’s face with configs all over the place, yet intuitively customizable for experienced Linux users.
This means she will be able to freely use it without your help, but you will be able to easily fine tune it to her preferences as well.
⚜︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Specifically Linux Mint Debian Edition
Three correct answers:
- Mint
- Fedora
- Pop
And a few incorrect answers:
- Ubuntu
- Arch
- Ubuntu again
- Really, don’t go with Ubuntu
Pop is such a cool project but it’s been kinda broken for me both times I’ve tried it, and then add to that what happened with Linus tech tips where him being dumb combined with pop having not fixed a major and obvious packaging issue that completely broke his system has kinda just left me with the impression they’re not super on top of the ball
I hope that’s changed, I want them to be successful, especially with cosmic
Who even uses normal arch anymore.
All the cool kids use endeavour or cachy. Which is like calling Ubuntu, Debian.
Nah all the cool kids are on Omarchy now.
Damn, I’m 2 months into my first Linux experience and went with Ubuntu Studio since I use my PC for freelance audio/music/art and it’s promoted as great for creatives. It took a lot of work to get my audio working without ALSA and more work to get smaller things working right. I’m concerned if I switch distros I’ll have to do it all again and I barely remember what I did to fix things haha. Think I’m stuck with Ubuntu. Didn’t realize it was so looked down on.
Ubuntu Studio is great, but absolutely not for beginners. Ubuntu Studio isn’t the same thing as Ubuntu, too. They change a lot from the base Ubuntu.
Oh ok, I didn’t know that. I thought it was just Ubuntu with pre installed programs and a low latency kernel. I’ve been enjoying the learning curve, even though it’s been frustrating at times I’ve learned so much in the last 2 months and love it haha
Fedora is pretty cool.
Linus Torvalds uses it, so you could say it’s the canonical distribution.
Second on fedora, have been using it as a daily driver for over a year and ot has been pretty solid.
As a general rule of thumb, I usually recommend Linux Mint to beginners. The installation and update processes are easy and intuitive, and there is a ton of software available, as well as good support if you know how to do web searches properly. The main trick is to try and remember that a paradigm shift needs to happen here. Linux is not Windows. It doesn’t work like Windows, and it has different aims and priorities. She will also need to be prepared to learn a bit and be slightly more hands-on with her computing. The learning curve with Mint is comparatively gentle, but it does exist.
This is all very broad and general, but I hope it helps. Good luck to the both of you. I hope you are satisfied with whatever you decide on.
Personally, I don’t think anyone new to Linux at this point, who isn’t tech-minded, should be pointed to an X11 environment. So until Mint devs have ported Muffin into a Wayland compositor, I wouldn’t recommend it. They’re used to a shiny experience visually, so I’d go with Plasma 6 running on Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Yeah I think mint advice is extremely dated, Bazzite or base Fedora is the way to go
I second the atomic Fedora ones with Plasma. Very stable system, updates run automatically like she is used to, and the Bazaar software center is a great and well organized central repository for flatpaks.
Not a mint user myself, but I have helped a friend install it. The install script at the time would silently crash if it had issues with the network card name. Researching it I found that this had been reported 8 months before my friend ran into it, and a PR submitted, but was not even looked at for a month after. Sure, these are all (largely) unpaid volunteers, but if your objective is to be beginner friendly, stuff like that really shouldn’t be left sitting for so long.
Wayland has way more compatibility issues especially with other Linux stuff lol
Linux Mint is the windows 7 experience of linux. It gets out of the way so you can work. It also has the best in-OS help tools. It’s also a bit more conservative in terms of newest features, so it’s a lot more reliable.
If she does PC gaming, you might want to look at Bazzite rather than Mint. It’s a lot better equipped for non-technical people to start gaming. It’s basically a preconfigured Fedora linux, so it’s got a solid foundation. It’s also something called an immutable distro, which basically means it’s more difficult to break as the core OS is “read only” (to simplify).
In terms of migrating, best to avoid dual booting off a single disk. Microsoft keeps breaking Linux installs (probably on purpose). So best to install a second SSD.
Before you migrate, have her make a list of software she uses and the hardware she has. Best to post that on a forum like this to have more experienced people look for possible issues.
When it gets to migration day, if bitlocker is disabled, you can access your windows data from linux.
Also get her on Lemmy and asking questions directly. The best thing you can teach a low tech person is how to get help.
Mint is a good jumping off point
Zorin OS is better
Isn’t Zorin very out of date?
I’ll be honest I tried zorin and it looked too much like MacOS for my tastes
If you’re supporting it, then one you are familiar with would be my recommendation. If you’re both beginners, then Mint.
Mint for Windows refugees
Fedora for Mac Refugees
My choice: Bazzite GNOME for Gamers, Children and Grandmas. It’s pretty, is damn indestructible and has a speedy app store with loads of cool free apps.
Bazzite keeps sounding better for her needs tbh
It’s truly a fantastic distro. Fedora atomic is very much an attempt at making Linux as easy and secure as Android. I recommend it for beginners and experts alike, truly awesome tech going on.
I’ve dabbled with a few different distros in VMs and laptops that I don’t use a whole lot over the years. I recently moved my main desktop to Bazzite and I love it. The built-in ‘ujust’ scripts, or whatever you call them, are fantastic. Setting up an 8bitdo pro 2 was a breeze. Getting new apps installed, even with distrobox, is really easy. I’m sold on ublue, probably going to move my work laptop to Aurora soon.
I’d say Mint or Fedora KDE for windows converts. They’re both good “just works” options, but KDE just by virtue of being more popular has excellent software and support that make it a great option.
Fedora w/ Gnome for Mac converts is a no brainer, and I’d add that you’re probably going to want the Dash2Dock Lite or Dash2Dock Animated extension for a Mac convert.
I’m not a child, gamer nor grandma but last time i tried mint a few years ago i literally cried, so it might be something for me
Fedora. I would not have said that two years, but I am blown away by how easy and up to date it is.
And I am normally an Arch person.
I also supprised myself a few years back when I ditched Arch Linux (after 10 years) for Fedora! I now use Fedora Silverblue, but would also reccomend having a look at the uBlue variants for different flavoring.
Yeah I ran it up on distrosea and was surprised how intuitive it already looked
KDE works perfectly on the KDE version which is official now. Updates are straight forward, lots of software available.
There are two “just works” distros I recommend to new users: Bazzite or Fedora.
Start with Bazzite. It is familiar and has lots of guardrails so it’s nearly impossible to break.
If you decide you want more control over your system later, switch to Fedora KDE.
If you decide you want even more control and flexibility, consider CachyOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
You will see Mint recommended a lot, but I don’t like it. The default desktop — Cinnamon — is very Windows 95, and I much prefer KDE Plasma, which doesn’t work well on Mint. Mint also has driver issues with newer hardware. But if you like retro and your hardware is older, give it a try.
Avoid Pop_OS right now. It’ll probably be amazing in a year, but the new Cosmic desktop (currently a beta) has a lot of annoying bugs with common linux GUI packages.
I loved Mint. It’s still great. Recently I installed Linux on a family member’s laptop which is not upgradeable to Windows 11. Hate to say it (and I may be a bit petty here): Mint looks dated, Cinnamon needs a facelift.
That was a reason I went with Zorin. It clearly tries to transition users that come from Windows with it’s design (honestly, it’s modded Gnome looks awesome). Even running .exe files is as simple as just opening them. Zorin will either just run them or suggest a Linux alternative. Had no issues with that OS so far.
That said, Mint or Ubuntu are solid choices for beginners (and pros alike).
Debian + KDE
Bazzite, i tried arch and then realized the whole wiki was like a uni level symposium and was burning through steps, kept doing instead of understanding, etc…
It’s probably amazing, but since my only interaction with linux back then was being forced to use it at uni and windows, I really wanted a good experience of what linux could be. I needed it to work out of the box and be unbreakable, so I went with bazzite.
It’s great, and I am digging the immutable aspect even if it broke my brain for any dev work, but once you learn how to use an immutable system (still figuring it out tbh) it’s solid, easy, and works great.
Really wished there was more resources on immutable systems for newcomers though XD
What’s the adjustment like with immutable systems?
Its not particularly crazy, most things can be installed via flathub. If something isnt there, install it through distrobox (you can install things through the AUR, packages like rpm and deb, etc). And if that doesn’t work, install the app directly through rpm-ostree (only thing I did this with was a vpn app, you can point to a .rpm file for this). I use flathub for the vast majority of things, I think I only have two apps installed outside of it.
What’s great is nothing ever breaks this way. Ever. It all works. Broken upgrades haven’t happened to me after a year of using this, meanwhile I had plenty on debian and small distros like manjaro, mint, cachyos, nobara.
What are some examples of broken upgrades? I can’t really think of any of Kubuntu, except that the recent major distro update broke my fan’s RGB and they run proprietary Windows-only control programs so I can’t fix it.
Mmm sometimes if you don’t update for a long time you can’t really update at all without following specific instructions. Nobara for instance had a major breakage between 41 and 42 versions that required you to debug from a boot drive iirc. One of my friends just had debian break on their not very used laptop and it can’t upgrade. Bazzite will not have these issues, image based upgrades solve the broken upgrade and config drift problems. And if for some reason it does break, it’s always solved by a one line rpm-ostree rebase command. Whereas with other distros the process to fix it is very involved usually
Ah ok. So far, upgrades on Linux seem quite messy in my experience. I still don’t fully get why libraries need to pull 1-2 GB of updates every other day, for instance. I don’t mind keeping up with bleeding edge distros, but the data usage can get irksome.
Well quite obvious: as the name “Debian” was coined to celebrate the union between Debra and Ian, makes it a de facto choice! ;)