My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
CachyOS with KDE, it works well rounded and has easy to use apps to maid arch super easy and if you need help there’s a convenient discord server filled with helpers, it’s well documented, and we use it so if they need help it would be easier to guide them through things. Heavy recommend. Plus if they don’t like pacman they can always get the flatpak store
Something immutable and auto updating, likely Fedora based because that’s what I use.
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.
Bazzite for young people, Mint for old people would be my first thought
A Fedora variant of some sort since they are up-to-date in terms of features and have a low learning curve
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.
