I’m looking for a distro to contribute to finally make 'year of Linux desktop, to happen. For me, I see that as full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac (is no middle click to paste).
Which distro comes closest to it?
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Would suggest Linux Mint
Mint, (?)ubuntu, and Pop!_OS are what I suggest because 1) most software install guides target these distros. Anything that uses a package manager other than apt means extra googling and pain for those who just want an OS that works and could care less about the miniscule advantages of one over another 2) stable releases and driver support and 3) similar UI to whatever they’re coming over from. Someone else ITT mentioned KDE for Windows and Gnome(or Cosmic once it’s stable) for Mac folk and I think that tracks well
I suggest LMDE not regular mint. Normal mint updates often and ocassionally with bugs while rare and mostly I see for gaming they do happen. Stability and reliability are king. So LMDE aka Linux mint debian edition. Its entirely the same as normal mint made by the same people but it’s rock solid unlike Ubuntu version.
Sincerely I’ve used both to game and daily pc usage even work. LMDE no questions.
Regular Mint is much close to what the OP is asking for. It removes the crappy Ubuntu stuff but gets to benefit from the good stuff like better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates and PPA support which is especially important if you have an AMD GPU as it’s how you’ll get up-to-date Mesa.
Up to date mesa is in regular mint but only sort of. You have to manually go bleeding edge if you want by installing mesa drivers manually. Base Mint is a few versions behind on purpose, stability and I would say your kernel version makes a bigger difference in the end given how good mint is I recommend 6.14 kernel especially on fresh hardware, you can change your kernel version anytime in the update manager preferences, 6.8 is old but stable. 6.14 is newer, faster in gaming. Unless your on brand new, brand new released hardware this a non issue truly.
Most people will be fine with stock mint and you can’t go wrong much with either. I game on stock mint full time! Windows only for BF6/dual boot. It’s all I knew for several years was mint before going to NIXos and fedora and more… My hardware is 7900xt 7600x. Full AMD on my rigs though I’ve built intel Nvidia… I’ve built dozens of PCs/laptops/servers as I build and sell them. You honestly can’t go wrong with either version but all I am saying is that if you hate bugs, updates ocassionally doing odd things especially to steam and proton. LMDE. I’ve been on mint for years this is just my 2 cents. I also value not fucking with my OS anymore I dislike command line memorization. I’m done tinkering and fixing shit all the time and prefer GUI or shit to just work ideally I’ll trouble shoot for a few minutes then I stop, no more days tied up over dumb shit. With windows or Linux. LMDE is my choice. Best of luck.
Getting hung up on feature parity with Windows and Mac is both a waste of time and literally impossible given the major differences between those two UIs. KDE already does most of that legwork anyway, and you can disable middle click paste easily.
IMO your time would be best spent making GUI tooling that doesn’t already exist. Identify a pain point for you that forces you to the terminal and start there.
Really great advice, was thinking of that myself recently. I’m considering making some GUI apps to address my terminal journeys. While I enjoy terminal, not everyone should.
Not helpful
Why would you want to disable middle-click-paste???
I couldn’t live without it.
Bazzite is the correct answer. Or steam OS. Anything immutable. Mint is not the right answer.
There is no right answer. While I love immutables, they bring their own set of problems to the table.
Sure but they answer the question correctly, whereas alternatives don’t.
It’s not about what you prefer, it’s about what meets the answer to their question most appropriately.
They are asking for a 100% gui/ui experience with not having to access the terminal.
The right answer to send someone to in that case with the ecosystem we have, is immutables. That what they are for.
They said GUI everything AND “just works”. I was more so referring to the latter.
My point is that nothing “just works”. With immutables, your system is less likely to break after updates, but introduce other headaches.
For example, immutable distros usually primarily use flatpaks. But not all apps are available as flatpaks, may have issues running under flatpak (ie IDEs), or have permission issues that you need some know-how to workaround. There may be an offiical package from the developers, but most immutable distros will discourage using such a package if it was an rpm. Even then, if you wanted to use the rpm, Universal Blue is moving in the direction of removing layering (natively bootc, replacing Fedora base). And also the fact that if you do want to overlay, you need to use the terminal.
The distro shouldn’t matter too much, but the desktop environment will.
I recommend using KDE if you want something similar to Windows, and GNOME if you want something similar to macOS.
Using a GUI also isn’t really dependent on the DE either for most programs. It’s dependent on whether or not a GUI for it exists in the first place.
you’ll become comfortable with the cli, it’s seriously not hard.
all you need to know to start is:
- ls (list files)
- cd (change directory)
- nano (edit text file)
then you can branch out from there
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has a GUI for almost everything. It has a nice GUI for basic system config, and uses YaST2 for deeper settings, and it uses Discover for Flatpaks as well as system library updates.
Although, I have seen a couple people say Discover shouldn’t be used for doing system updates because it can fail, and to only use it for Flatpak updates and installs. I dunno. But it’s not like typing
sudo zypper dupto do a distro upgrade is hard, so I just do that out of an abundance of caution.OpenSUSE has some other cool features too, like having Snapper installed by default for system snapshots. It’s pretty easy to roll back if an upgrade goes sideways. There’s a boot entry that lets you open a previous snapshot as read-only and then you can make that snapshot permanent by creating a new top-level snapshot from it. So then you can at least use your computer while you try to figure out why the upgrade you did failed.
You’ll probably want to use KDE as your desktop environment. It’ll be somewhat familiar if you’re use to Windows, and it has a lot of features that make it comfortable to use.
There are lots of good YouTube videos on why OpenSUSE is pretty cool. Check some out.
Second for Tumbleweed!!
The low-to-nothing maintenance rolling release (in my experience). I recommend it if you have to maintain computers of family & friends (no more release upgrades, out of the box snapshots, etc).It’s so friendly & hard to break (for a normal person).
I know opinions vary, but I also love zypper.
Is MacOs “absolutely no cli”? It wasn’t when I was using it (admittedly, some 10yrs ago), except for the basic things (which any mainstream linux distro also provides).
What about Windows? Back in the day I would have paid to have a semi-decent CLI instead of being forced to use regedit (I hear regedit is still going strong, but I’ve not touched windows for an even longer period than MacOs)
What about Windows?
Every Microsoft forum suggestion:
sfc /scannow
Windows hasn’t been “No CLI” since the requirements for TPM were added to Win 11 at the latest. Arguably, it’s been even longer if you wanted to get any customization beyond “changing window border colors and desktop background,” or if you wanted to do “hacker” stuff like remove start menu ads, but I guess most average users just didn’t bother.
Resentment aside, this is more attacking the letter of the query than the spirit. At best, OP admits the terminal isn’t bad and scary but still wants a distro that works best for GUI-focused people, at worst their eyes glazed over and they stopped reading everything you said after “when I was using it”
Been in and out of Linux since 2006.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon DE is the only distro I’ve ever used that worked flawlessly for everything without needing to use the terminal at all. It worked so well it was boring. It’s the only distro I would recommend to a lay person
Linux Mint is often recommended to users coming from Windows, so… Kubuntu, Pop!OS and OpenSuSE are maybe also decent for that use case.
full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac
You want Windows or Mac.
If you want a computer that you can do stuff like web-browsing, document/spreadsheet/pdf/slideshow editing/creation, gaming, or multimedia processing on, there are distros and utilities on Linux that make those more-or-less easy and beginner-friendly,
BUT it requires divesting oneself of the habits, behaviors, and paradigms of other operating systems and being willing to learn anew. Community-based Libre software is developed in an entirely different way for an entirely different purpose; because of that, it is nearly impossible to recreate the same software as for-profit proprietary software. One is made by a community hacking together a functional system that suits their needs, the other is made to generate revenue, and thus has to keep users dependent on it by trapping them in dark patterns and igorance of its workings.
If you just want “Mac or Windows, but free as in beer,” suck it up, pay the devil his due, and buy one of those OSes. Libre Software is an entirely different paradigm, and thus requires a whole paradigm shift before anyone will be happy with it; on-boarding people who aren’t ready to divest themselves of the old paradigm just leads to disgruntled users who blame you for anything wrong with their PC, and creates a market void in the FOSS community ready to be filled by corpo proprietary slopware.
Mint or Fedora require no more command line than Windows does.
I daily drive Debian and it doesn’t require CLI for anything other than troubleshooting the problems I caused myself. There has been one time in 5+ years where it booted to console because the maintainers made changes to the kernel that fucked up the legacy nvidia drivers, and it had a workaround of booting to a previous kernel until they fixed it within the week. For newbies that might be scary the first time it happens, but its an easy fix that still didn’t require the CLI.
But nowhere did I say Linux required the terminal, I was addressing a different part of OP’s question. I guess since it’s such a prevalent myth, not denying it is tantamount to implicit agreement, so here’s me denying it.
This is the right answer to this question. You have to be ready to learn a new OS if you want to switch to Linux. IMO that doesn’t mean you should expect to be doing everything through the command line but if even a ui difference is going to be a problem then it’s probably not time.
I don’t know of any that need some final push. I would think it would be better to just contribute to kde or gnome ui/ux wise. I would say my distro but I almost never click the scroll wheel and just tried it out and it does paste on middle click. No idea why that would be a deal breaker. Also have no idea what windows does on middle click even though its been the majority of what I used day to up until a year or so ago or for the mac even though I used it in the late aughts.
Linux Mint comes closest ime, but it really depends what you want to do. You should ask yourself this question: am I a power user? If the answer is ‘no’, and you just need to do basic media/productivity stuff, you’re going to have a frictionless experience with most popular Linux distros. If the answer is ‘yes, but I don’t want to learn another operating system’ then you should stick with what you know.
What kind of contributing?
If you mean actually adding code or packaging or testing or anything along those lines, you’re probably looking for gnome. They hate normal linux stuff like middle click paste.
If you mean contributing by using linux, just pick something and start. You’ll have a lot to learn no matter what so there’s no point wasting time trying to figure out what you’re gonna want and working towards that.
If you mean putting other people on linux, don’t do that. It will make them unhappy and cause you lots of stress and work. Find a way to keep them on the systems they’re familiar with, either by using the well documented windows 10 iot ltsc or the accessibility options in macos. People deserve to choose weather or not they switch operating systems and when those decisions are made for them it needs to be done by those who will be working with them every day.
It would be helpful if your example of behaving identical to macos or windows were more clear, since macos and windows behave wildly different from each other. It’s like saying you need a normal european car that works just like your 2500 Silverado or civic si.
Plain old Fedora works great. My mom uses it and is fine with just the app store.
It doesn’t really pass OP’s criteria if you need to install Nvidia drivers, though. It does not have a 1-click graphical installer like Mint and Ubuntu do.
