My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
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.
Something immutable and auto updating, likely Fedora based because that’s what I use.
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
My head tells me Linux Mint
my heart says listen to your head
My head tells me Linux Mint
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.
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.
I’d put LMDE on it, the familiarity of Mint with the stability of Debian and no fucking snaps.
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 🤣
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
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.
Linux Mint is by far the smoothest experience I’ve had so far in trying Nobara, Debian, Manjaro otherwise.
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.
Bazzite for young people, Mint for old people would be my first thought
If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.
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.
Linux Mint Debian Edición if the laptop is not brand new.
