with the recent windows news, I wanna switch to Linux. I tried mint a few years ago and was annoyed and frustrated with multiple things, like having to input the password all the time and the general ammunt of constant trouble shooting and needing a tutorial for the most basic things.
I want a distro that:
- Is very user friendly, ideally not requiring a terminal
- Is hard to accidentally fuck up
- ideally doesn’t require a password for every input
I basically just use my laptop to browse the web, draw in krita and use ms office apps (have been getting used to open office lately)
What do y’all suggest?
if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.
fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.
silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.
Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.
Windows troubleshooting is always SFC and DISM as the new “have you tries turning it off and on again” default first recommended step lol.
Zorin is user friendly. You may still need to use a password for doing updates.
If you game, then probably Bazzite.
If you hate the command line you could try tumbleweed, you will have Yast2 GUI apps for everything yo want to alter on the system. And it has automatic snapshotting if out you mess things up, you can boot to a previous snapshot. Howeverits will require a password whenever you want to make system changes. And a learning curve compared to other distros.
Not really getting away from typing a password, that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
As someone who uses and likes tumbleweed I don’t know if I would recommend it for inexperienced users. Once you start adding third party repositories for things like video codecs, dependency issues can get really nasty. Zypper will always offer you solutions to resolve them, but if you aren’t careful which one you select you can easily do stuff like accidentally remove your network driver which is a very annoying problem to have
Shhh don’t tell them about 3rd party repos. That’s why I somewhat disclaimed it with the Learning Curve, but having yast and snapper for me onboard as a new Linux user was very helpful.
Yeah but you kind of need codecs from packman or you’re going to have a bad time if you want like streaming or video calls. Unless more things are included out of the box now?
The inclusion of open H264 was helpful.
When I started my Linux journey a couple of years ago, I tried lots of distros and experienced some of the same frustrations. The distro that hooked me and just worked was Pop! OS. It was very user friendly, didn’t require any fiddling, it just worked. Later I wanted a more up-to-date system, and after trying several distros I settled with Fedora.
Other thoughts: …be sure to install Timeshift (system rollback app). …my experience is that gnome desktop is easier, cleaner, less tweaking and less overwhelming than kde.
+1 for Fedora.
I started my Linux journey back in 2011 with Arch on my MacBookPro 17". I had a great time and enjoyed the steep learning curve, but around 2018 I needed something that just worked to keep myself from fiddling to much with the OS and get to work on other tasks, and settled for Fedora. The last few years i have very much enjoyed Fedora Silverblue, but there are still a couple of sharp edges around video codecs and the browser. But that is about it.
Fedora keeps me productive!
It looks like you want SteamOS. I recommend either getting a Steam Deck, wait for the Steam Machine or install it compatible hardware if you have any. No Nvidia GPUs.
SteamOS checks all three requirements for the most part, maybe 3 not so much. But it will be near impossible to fuck it up as it has a read-only filesystem and all apps are installed through flatpak which are sandboxed similar to apps on iOS.
You should check Mint again, things in the Linux world are improving fast lately. Some people got their grampas into Linux and they are happy using it, with your use case it can easily also be the case, the terminal it’s not needed, may be sporadically and to setup some things as you like at first, like changing settings to not enter passwords, may be it’s not so safe but it’s not as unsafe as using Windows. Just get used to the good habit of making regular backups. In any case just make a post asking and we will be happy to help. Just go ahead and slowly you will get confidence to do more difficult things. The freedom that you experience using Linux really worth it, but it can take time to appreciate.
First, try LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; it is a highly maintained fork of the latter, with plenty of improvements. Another thing is, even if there are GUIs for everything, do not be afraid of using the terminal! As another commenter noted, it can even be easier. As for passwords, it is like that for security purposes; if you disable it, you’ll be at a higher risk of breaking something.
I’m sure you could manage to do a lot of things without a terminal on something like Fedora or Mint, but you really should just learn to use the command line. If you’re expecting it to be anything close to the windows command line it is not, it’s way easier to use and you’ll be able to do things so much faster than you ever could with a gui on windows. Learning everything you really need shouldn’t take more than a couple hours.
The one other option I can think of is ChromeOS Flex, but even there you’re going to have a way better experience if you learn to do things from the command line when appropriate
What’s your favorite color? Pick the distro with that color in their logo.
- Linux is intentionally made to be modular and using the terminal is pretty much the only standard way to do things across many distributions.
I highly suggest you stop avoiding it because it will most likely be faster and easier to do something (i.e. system-level changes) with it than not.
- If you want a hard-to-fuck-up distro, I think Atomic (at least that’s what Fedora calls them) distros are the best.
Similar to smartphones or MacOS, entire OS is a singular image that is also updated all at once. Core parts of the filesystem is also read-only, meaning it is pretty much impossible to mess things up if you don’t mean to do so deliberately.
The best in this regard are from uBlue project: Bazzite (most popular), Bluefin, Aurora, etc. While Bazzite is intended for gaming (things like Steam are pre-installed), the other are for general use. Bluefin uses GNOME desktop, while Aurora has KDE Plasma desktop environment. Look up their visuals and choose whichever one you like. I prefer Aurora because KDE Plasma is often much more familiar to Windows users.
- uBlue distros don’t require a password for system updates (they happen automatically in the background) and so do installing/updating programs.
You’re probably going to find that the terminal will come up at some point no matter what version of Linux you choose.
For most I would recommend Mint, but since you mentioned having a negative experience previously, perhaps Zorin OS would be a better alternative?
If you want a hardened OS that would be difficult to break, an immutable OS may be a better route for you. Here’s a link with some options to choose from. My recommendation would be Fedora Silverblue.
As someone else mentioned, you will still need to use a password when making changes to the system. You can set it to boot without a password if you prefer to. I use Bazzite (gaming focused immutable OS; based on Fedora Silverblue) and I want to say 90% of the time I only need my password at boot.
If you need office apps, LibreOffice and Open Office should do what you need. MS office can be a challenge to get running, but the online web versions will run out of the box.
Hope that helps!
Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.
I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)
On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.
I do have it on the side with some windows plug in right now.
try out Zorin OS
After having stability issues with Ubuntu I switched to fedora. It just works. If you need to install something with the terminal just Google how to install program fedora and you’ll find some simple commands to copy and paste. Just make sure you understand what you’re inputting.
For these requirements, I’d recommend PopOS. Thanks to its app centre being very well designed, you never need to touch the terminal for anything. Package managers are apt and Flatpak, so you get full access to basically anything that GNU/Linux has to offer. The install itself is super easy as well. I think it may be one of the best beginner distros.
