My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
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.
Fedora. That’s what I run on my laptop and it’s great.
Linux Mint Debian Edición if the laptop is not brand new.
I’d put LMDE on it, the familiarity of Mint with the stability of Debian and no fucking snaps.
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.
Fedora Atomic.
Updates are stable.
They can’t fuck it up.
Respectfully huge disagree. Standard Fedora would be better (and is my personal recommendation) since a bunch of administrative command syntax would be different with Atomic. The internet’s going to show troubleshooting advice for the former 9 times out of 10.
You just described exactly why I would install an Atomic distribution.
So they can’t run something they don’t understand, and end up nuking their install.
The biggest differences in usage (dnf vs rpm-ostree) essentially function as a knowledge/intelligence filter to prevent fuckups.
Everything I value is against “how long it will work without issue”, “how quick is an update”, and finally “how much effort do I need to help maintain it”.
Atomic systems have netted me positives on all my values. The people I know who used atomic, have only approached me due to edge cases such as specific laptop fan issues, which weren’t hindered by the atomic system.
They’re both terrible choices for a beginner - constant version churn every six months confuses newcomers, some initial brokenness after every new release - Fedora would be the last distro I’d install.
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.
My head tells me Linux Mint
my heart says listen to your head
My head tells me Linux Mint
If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.
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.
A Fedora variant of some sort since they are up-to-date in terms of features and have a low learning curve
Bazzite for young people, Mint for old people would be my first thought
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.
What is the persons skill level and are both of you OK with you picking up the slack?
She’s a pretty proficient windows user who mentioned looking at kbuntu. She can probably handle some rough edges on her own, but I have no interest in long term support. So probably mint 🤣
Whichever one you wind up with, Dolphin as a file manager blows the monstrosity that windows has out of the water. For someone who’s eeked out some power/efficiency out of windows usage it should be very pleasant finding out the standard software available for Linux these can almost always make you more efficient with less effort.
I use kubuntu. It’s a good choice for people who don’t have experience but are able and willing to search for answers.
KDE defaults are solid and utilizes a lot of Windows muscle memory, and being based on Ubuntu means that it’s really easy to search for answers on virtually any question you might have. Plus widespread package support
