Any recommendations for a linux distro that i can set up and be reasonably sure my non techy SO won’t break accidentally? The set up doesn’t have to be easy it just has to not break once I leave her alone with it. My first thought was popOS.
My plan is to have 2 profiles and not give her access to sudo. I just don’t want to have to go into it unless she needs a new program.
Fedora Atomic desktops, specifically Kinoite with KDE6 works well for me, and is basically unbreakable due to the way it works.
I vote the same, but I’d suggest a uBlue spin of the Fedora Atomic desktops. They have better defaults (all batteries included, as they say) and are easier to use overall IMHO. Bluefin and Bazzite are both great options, and both offer KDE and Gnome variants.
Edit: TIL the KDE version of Bluefin is called Aurora.
BTW, uBlue is getting some big recognition lately. They have been on the Fedora Podcast (official) and Framework Laptops has official instructions on their website for installing Bluefin and Bazzite.
Any of them. Just don’t give the root password.
This is what I do with my mom and her boyfriend. I’ve had them on Linux for a few years now and neither have managed to break anything.
Aurora by Universal Blue. She will be unable to break it, and it’s so freaking easy to use and install.
While I enjoy using Aurora, there were a bunch of issues popping up over the last few months (e.g. display freezes). I guess that’s the danger of a rolling release cycle, but I’m not sure it’s 100% as foolproof as it needs to be right now.
Aurora is not a rolling release. It’s part of Universal Blue, based on Fedora Silverblue.
Okay, let’s call it a semi-rolling release. Having breaking changes every 6 months is still very often for a set-and-forget system.
Use Bluefin or some other immutable/atomic distro.
The upside is that it’s rock solid and will likely never fail in a way that cant be easily rolled back. The downside being that it’s slightly more complex to administer than a traditional distro model (which probably isn’t a big problem if you are going to be administering your SO’s PC for the most part.)
Bluefin is basically a more general desktop, less gaming-focused version of Bazzite. Bluefin uses Gnome, but there’s also a KDE Plasma version called Aurora.
Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like Cinnamon or Gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you goAny immutable distro would do I guess
Does she want this?
If so then just set her up exactly what you have so you can easily help when there’s a problem.
If not then get her the computer she actually wants.
It’s a no money and cant run windows 11 situation.
Consider 0patch before you give up on windows. They do good work and it’s real affordable.
No matter what you do, in this circumstance it’s worth keeping that windows partition around.
I do think whatever you use is the right choice though.
E: I looked up the 0patch pricing and you get a year of patches for a bunch of eol versions of windows like 7 and 10 for $25 a year. It’s a good deal I think for people who don’t want to or can’t upgrade to 11, and they beat Microsoft to a bunch of zero day exploits.
I know you said it’s a no money kind of situation but I really think when ten is still a possibility theres two bucks and some change a month in the budget.
Consider 0patch before you give up on windows
Unless there’s a very specific application need, I think the most sensible thing would be to ditch Windows. Better for security, better for the world to increase the mainstreaming of Linux.
Yeah wouldn’t it be nice…
But the most considerate thing for the user is to help them use what they want to use. There’s also a real benefit to keeping ahold of that windows because people often have their own ways of doing things and it may be more expedient to boot back into 10 than to figure out how to complete some task in Linux.
Aren’t there ways to patch the whatever-it-is that is “required” by W11 that older PCs don’t have so that you can bypass the check and have W11 on older machines? I feel like that’s a better solution than paying for Microsoft’s garbage, if one was bent on not moving to Linux
I suggested 0patch not to bypass some arbitrary check, for which there are many options, but to provide access to security patches and updates after Microsoft stops publishing them for 10.
I guess it depends what she does on her pc.
But ignoring that, Mint without sudo. Throw in flatpaks and appimages.
Immutable distros are probably fine too but in my experience they tend to be a bit fussy if you need to change something in the system config.
Ubuntu, always a solid choice for beginners but Gnome shell is a bigger change from windows conpared to Cinamon.
P.S. I have Mint on our TV PC and my SO handdles it without issues.
I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad’s laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I’d set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)
BLUEFIN.
If you’re not going to give her sudo access then I’d say it’ll be really hard maybe even impossible to screw up. Also maybe setup a cron job that’ll do auto updates and if needed add in a check to make sure it isn’t uninstalling anything. Also how about immutable distro.
Debian is good at being basic, generic, stable AND has an automatic security-update-in-the-background feature
The whole amount of instruction to give to Dear SO is just to reboot the machine if it ever seems to misbehave
“Hello IT have you tried turning it on and off again?”
OpenSUSE MicroOS
Nixos with whatever defaults you don’t want her touching, then she can use nix profiles to install extra software if she wants
Has “non techy” evaded you ?
You can install imperatively using nice profiles. So you the OP can set up the base distro in a way their SO can’t break. Then any extra software can be installed imperatively using nix profiles. Any installed software will work as normals. Checking the normal places for configurations if their SO even needs to go that far
Zorin OS is trending
