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.
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.
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.
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 privacy, 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.
An immutable distro would be a good choice. They are distros designed to be more resilient against failure. For a gamer, bazzite is a solid choice; otherwise, silverblue.
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 ?
In fairness, there are attempts to make Nix user-friendly, such as SnowflakeOS, featuring a lot of improvements including a graphical app store etc, but those are alpha and not ready for an average user.
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
BLUEFIN.
Or Aurora/Kinoite, for a more familiar experience
I’ve set up Linux mint for my sister in law and didn’t hear from her the whole two years she was in college. But nowadays we have immutable distros. They’re fantastic for a set it and forget it kinda thing. They’re solid for those who don’t want things to break.
Pop all the way
maybe not for a few months since they’re gonna be launching COSMIC this year, which will likely be buggier than usual for a bit.
Sure but 22.04 is LTS without COSMIC and you’ll have plenty time to upgrade to 24.04 with COSMIC
People are complaining 22 packages are getting stale… But these people should be using fedors anyway lol
Ah lol then don’t use LTS? The alpha is out for 24.04
I’ve had my wife on Pop for 3-4 months now but she performed some update in the Pop Shop this week that totally borked the bootloader. I was not able to repair or even get it to see her hard drive.
I was able to mount the drive using the Pop live USB and backup her data. I moved her over to Bazzite, which is what I use.
I have PCs here running pop updated the same way, no issues. Are you sure it wasn’t a hardware problem?
I should probably clarify that I think my wife did something wrong and not Pop. I ran it smoothly for months before moving to Bazzite on my item machine. She knows enough to be dangerous and may have changed something without knowing what it did.
An atomic system would be more SO proof for me.
Linux mint is a good, “click first” distro that won’t break without root + will be easy for her to use. For something with a more modern desktop and more recent updates, Bazzite is really good at just working and (in my experience) has never broken
Bazzite might be what i go for the more i look at it. Thanks
I like bazzite!
Here’s the bazzite attempt at viral marketing, everyone.
Remember when we saw it for MX Linux?
Be careful about what you install on your computers.
Edit: The incessant, vehement backlash against calling out shilling is always a telltale sign of shilling. Shills are not allowed to let people accuse them of shilling without going through their playbook of what to say next.
Its popular rnow because of all the handhelds I think
Bro I’m the lead developer and I’m just now seeing this, just accept you called the viral marketing wrong.
We’ve grown to the point that when I market something, I tell people not to listen to me because I’m biased.
I mean it’s not perfect but what is?
I tried MX Linux for a while, it was okay. did I miss something?
I never mentioned perfection.
I hope people reading this can start to recognize shilling when they see it.
Dude you might be paranoid…
Nah. I just wasn’t born yesterday.
“Someone mentions a distro they like” ≠ shilling. I use Bazzite and have been for months. Before that, used Nobara, EndeavourOS, and vanilla Fedora, along with a number of others I tried when I was distro-hopping. Wholeheartedly believe that Bazzite is currently the best generally-available Linux distro for gaming and is up there for general use. It’s not perfect, but nothing is - it gets close for the use-cases I mentioned, though.
I tried mx for 7 minutes. it installed nvidia drivers and that killed it. off to the next distro I hopped, knowing the problem could have been easy to fix. shame, it seemed interesting.
You know the build scripts which turn Fedora Kinoite into Bazzite are all open on GitHub, right… 🤦
For me, Mint borked the network after an update. I never got to figure what was wrong - the local network worked, the Internet connection was there and other devices worked through the same router, remote IPs were unreachable so it’s not a DNS problem, etc.
But I might have had an edge case.
I have tried most known distros but not bazzite, yet. might be the next one on my distrohop journey since everyone recommends it. hope it works better than fedora kde, it does not get along with my hardware AT ALL
I switched from ubuntu to debian when 12 was released and it’s been fine. Only thing i was worried about was running WoW via lutris but had no issues.
So when my SO windows pc died we bought some newish parts and i installed debian on it as well. Also installed chrome since that’s her browser of choice. She’s still getting used to gnome, but all she needs is browser, WoW, and libreoffice, which is close enough that it hasnt been an issue. She doesn’t even know how to update the system.
If she wants a familiar experience and ease of switching, why not consider KDE or Cinnamon? Both are officially available within Debian.
Zorin OS is trending
Zorin is a good shout, but it’s definitely not “trending”, it’s been a staple recommendation for over 5 years now.
I prefer Manjaro, super easy.
I’d rather recommend Manjaro to those who want to start out simple, but then get into the details of Linux.
Unless all you do is browsing, Manjaro starts easy but then has a steep curve because it’s still Arch, with the added issue of practically every Manjaro newbie ignoring warnings about AUR and getting to taste the consequences.
It will require you to work with the terminal, troubleshoot, and get to understand your system. This is not bad - that’s how I got into Linux and never looked back after all all, and I generally don’t join the “Manjaro bad” crowd - but this is not a bulletproof “SO 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?”
Any immutable distro would do I guess
That is, if you have experience running immutable distros yourself and are able to serve as a tech support for them should they ever need it.
A lot is different under the hood, and general Linux knowledge doesn’t always help.
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.
Depends on the use case. For example, I actually managed to bork Aurora to the unbootable state while trying to make a VPN work properly a while ago. It didn’t live long :D
Semi-serious suggestion: Guix or NixOS. They’re not break-safe per se, but if they do break something, you can use the OS’ previous generations to go back to an operational state. Just… don’t let them use the commands that delete older generations.
(Semi-serious because they’re both not exactly mainstream and not eactly conventional in their setup.)
Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, “turn it off and then on again” will almost always work to fix the OS.
I’m gonna be the boring guy.
RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)
Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.
Benefits:
- Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
- Actually works
- Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
- If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
- Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.
Drawbacks:
- Boring (for you)
- Not ideal for gaming
If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.
Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.
In the era of Flatpak, I kind of agree with you.
The primary drawback is the complete lack of packages. A home user is going to want something not included and then things fall apart. Flatpaks and Distrobox have made that a lot better.
If you could get away with a RHEL core and Flatpak for apps, you would have a pretty solid setup for a “normal” person.
I both agree with you, and kinda disagree.
If you venture into installing Flatpaks on such a system, just keep in mind that:
- Auto updates must be on
- The Maintainer of the Flatpak in question must be expected to provide security updates for the next five years or so. Personally, I’d only use it for packages provided directly by project maintainers (i.e. Dropbox from Dropbox Inc. as packaged by Dropbox Inc.).
Keep in mind, like 95% of normal people (we are not normal) don’t know what a package manager is and only use
- ”The internet”
- Webmail
- Google Docs
- Spotify
For that, we need the default desktop install and the Spotify app (probably a Flatpak). That’s about it. It’s a glorified web browser with batteries. Treat it that way and keep it that way, unless your SO has any specific needs and requirements.
The limited and dated package set is kind of a feature. Only packages that should work until the laptop breaks, and only packages that won’t change randomly when you update (mostly).
Really seems like we are agreeing. I get that the limited package set is a feature. I also get that it is both too small and too enterprise to satisfy most people you would describe as a “SO” precisely because they are probably normal people.
You gave the excellent example of Spotify and suggested a Flatpak for that. Honestly, I am not sure where we are in disagreement. Especially since I started by “mostly agreeing” myself. We even agree on that. :)
