My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
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.
Mint
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.
I’d put LMDE on it, the familiarity of Mint with the stability of Debian and no fucking snaps.
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.
Depends on the user. An older family member, Linux mint. A gamer, cachyOS. Otherwise fedora could also be an option. But in most cases, the person would choose and install a distro themselves if they are interested and that means that mint becomes the most common answer to the question.
Debian. I want that thing to be so stable they forget they ever had problems.
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 say mint is great for non tech people (90% of the time it’s the DE and GUI apps that are important rather than the distro, but mint has good ones by default). For former windows power users I’d recommend CachyOS or Fedora. Either way, you can boot from USB for any of these as a live demo; I have images for all 3 + memtest on my ventoy USB.
Linux Mint Debian Edición if the laptop is not brand new.
Something immutable and auto updating, likely Fedora based because that’s what I use.
I installed Aurora cause immutable and auto update so hard to break anything. And normal user only need Browser, LibreOffice and maybe Thunderbird
I think this what I came up with last time I considered this question, and I also wonder if I might want to use it for my next machine myself. Do you have a lot of experience using it? Do you feel like it performs pretty well? (I just have concerns that everything being containerized with flatpak and docker might affect that…)
Have Aurora on my thinkpad and so far it was super reliable. But I dont power use that its just for mail, libreoffice, browsing
I work in an environment with a lot of people that are not very technically skilled. We run Ubuntu (GNOME) in their Laptops.
If I install Linux for family members etc. I install Ubuntu.
My reasoning is:
Ubuntu/.deb based systems are very wifely supported. If you google “how do u do X on Linux” most likely an answer tailored to Ubuntu may come up. Which is however mostly important if the Users will be doing some stuff themselves.Also, I believe Desktops make a huge difference because that’s how people interact with their Computer. And in my opinion it’s not super important what desktop you start people on, its important it stays cohesive. My parents PC’s run MATE for that stability* (and for the “classic” usage scheme they learned back in the XP days) but even GNOME has a pretty stable usage paradigm these days …
Tl;dr: My reccomendation always is Ubuntu with a Desktop that resembles what they are used to.
* though with the MATE project seeming less active these days I’ve been looking for an alternative with low switching friction
I put Mint on my brother’s laptop when his hard drive died, he’s not a techie sort of person at all and has had no complaints.
If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.
