My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
Debian. I want that thing to be so stable they forget they ever had problems.
Mint
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.
Basic Debian
Yes, it is a bit behind the curve but it is solid, it works and can provide a solid environment for the average run of the mill user.
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, 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.
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
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
I love cachyos with KDE! Not sure if I’d recommend it to a complete noob, but if they’re familiar enough with computers in general, then go for it!
Thats totally fair, its what we recommended our partner who is a complete noob as-well and they really enjoyed it! The only set up thing we had to help with was the FsTab situation with multiple drives.
HML if it’s for someone else.
HML
Hold My Lard?
Hannah Montana Linux
Whatever you are comfortable with supporting.
Linux Mint Debian Edición if the laptop is not brand new.
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.
Fedora Silverblue
I’d put LMDE on it, the familiarity of Mint with the stability of Debian and no fucking snaps.
