So i was surprised today when my fiancee told me she was thinking about switching over to linux. Surprised because she is absolutely not technically minded, but also because she was weary about having Microsoft AI slop forced on her PC every update. ( i’m so proud!)
Now i’ve used a little linux but i’ve always been a holdout. Won’t stop me from moving someone else over but i have too much going on in my setup to deal with that right now. So i’m not super versed but i was able to give her the basic rundown of what distros are, concerns when switching, what may and may not be available, shes still on board so we’re doing this! Knowing her she would like to not have to transition too much, whats something fairly hands off and easy to learn. I’ve heard some good things about mint from hanging around you nerds the past few years but also some not so good things, any suggestions?
next concern is what kind of transfer process is this going to be? i have some spare HDD’s so we can try and get everything ported over but i’m so busy with school right now i can’t quite allocate the time to really deep dive this.
Any help is appreciated, cheers!
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don’t like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Now hold on, everyone else is saying bazzite is built for gaming but did you just say it isn’t or did I read that wrong?
She’s definitely a gamer, currently working through AC shadows and horizon zero dawn I believe
I do believe her stuff should be immutable though, that would be a horrible experience for her and could make her want to run back to windows
It is, but it works fine even if you aren’t a gamer
Mint is still a great choice if just for the ease of installation. I agree they’re lagging behind a bit in the transition to Wayland but for most users that’s not really a big issue. Mint also has one of the largest communities so getting support will be easier. To me Mint is still an excellent choice for getting started with Linux. I’ve been using it for years and I see no reason whatsoever to switch.
What exactly is easier about the installation than my suggestion?
the fedora community is just as large as the mint community, and just as well supported.
i’m not telling you to switch, I’m saying there’s no reason to start with it if you haven’t tried linux before. Switching is a much bigger choice because you are already comfortable.
Why would a beginner who isn’t already comfortable choose mint?
Good points.
I will also add that Bazzite isn’t just for beginners, it’s just more friendly towards them. I’ve been running it for like a year now and it’s just fantastic.
Almost boringly stable