My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
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.
especially for new converts (or those that do not know what an OS is)… the curated store of applications makes it very easy to push people away from microsoft.
My head tells me Linux Mint
my heart says listen to your head
My head tells me Linux Mint
Head says Linux Mint
Heart says listen to the head
Tiling WM Arch
Mint is always my go to safe suggestion.
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 has been my go-to, except for a couple of people who ended up with pop!_os… mostly cause I showed them some options and that’s the one they thought looked cool lol
What are this options? I just switched to mint yesterday. I had a spare hard drive and a 12 year old computer not being used. The 120gb ssd is lightning fast compared to the old 1tb HD and it turned this old broken uselessness into a slick new machine. But I’m almost a complete newbie at Linux so mint/cinnamon it is.
A lot of them are debian/ubuntu based ones. Mint, zorin; pop!_os used to be in the list as well, but less so now, since COSMIC is kinda under baked (even if I myself am a big fan)… then for people who know what a computer is I also usually throw in some non-debian distros like fedora/nobara, and for people I actively trust to be capable of using a computer (which is mostly my friends who work in IT/computing or related fields) and who run bleeding edge hardware they also sometimes had ones like cachy or endevour thrown in… the bleeding edge hardware feels less relevant now tho, with no one being able to afford a computer :p
Anywho, mint is fine, there’s no reason to not stick to it
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.
Are you committing to having her Linux setup to do everything her windows can do? Mint would be good at that point.
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.
Linux Mint is by far the smoothest experience I’ve had so far in trying Nobara, Debian, Manjaro otherwise.
Does Mint have screensaver and locking issues with Cinnamon?
I install Mint on computers of people that don’t want Windows and that I have to help, but I personally use Debian and MATE. Recently I tried to use Cinnamon on Debian but the screensaver was not always working. Sometimes I was away for days and when I was coming back, my monitor was still on. And sometimes the screensaver got stuck, impossible to remove without restarting my session.
I have a friend that tried Mint too, and he basically told me the same thibg was happening to him.
I have not heard about this from other folks to whom I installed Mint, but since they’re all very basic users that turn off their computer every time they are done, it never came up.
It would be my only issue with Mint for beginners. If they leave their computer running and come back later, there’s a slight chance that the screensaver will either not be started, or very difficult to exit.
What the crap? Surely this can’t be a widespread issue?
I believe this is an X issue, not a Mint issue. Most other distros have switched to Wayland, but Mint will use X until Wayland is mature enough.
Not strictly a Mint issue, but it’s still sotfware from them.
The development of Cinnamon began by the Linux Mint team following the April 2011 release of GNOME 3…
Ideally it would be a laptop/distro pairing that is officially supported by the laptop vendor. For better or worse, I think most often the distro is Ubuntu or Red Hat.
I’ve never used for-fee subscription distros like Ubuntu Pro or RHE, but if someone had the money to burn and a viable use case, I wouldn’t stop them.
RHEL (and I’m assuming Ubuntu Pro) is really more for like your company’s servers than an end user’s desktop. There’s really no reason to go that route unless you really need to get security patches for a super long time but won’t just upgrade I guess
RHEL is great for servers, but not an awesome experience for a user workstation, IMO
Hannah Montana Linux, obviously.
Nah fucking hit em with the temple os.
This is the only answer, regardless of the question.
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.
NixOS and tell them to figure it out.
