My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
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.
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.
Ideally it would be a laptop/distro pairing that is officially supported by the laptop vendor. For better or worse, I think most often the distro is Ubuntu or Red Hat.
I’ve never used for-fee subscription distros like Ubuntu Pro or RHE, but if someone had the money to burn and a viable use case, I wouldn’t stop them.
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 🤣
especially for new converts (or those that do not know what an OS is)… the curated store of applications makes it very easy to push people away from microsoft.
Fedora because a) it’s what I use so it’s easier for me to help them with and b) it’s organizationally big and stable.
Does Mint have screensaver and locking issues with Cinnamon?
I install Mint on computers of people that don’t want Windows and that I have to help, but I personally use Debian and MATE. Recently I tried to use Cinnamon on Debian but the screensaver was not always working. Sometimes I was away for days and when I was coming back, my monitor was still on. And sometimes the screensaver got stuck, impossible to remove without restarting my session.
I have a friend that tried Mint too, and he basically told me the same thibg was happening to him.
I have not heard about this from other folks to whom I installed Mint, but since they’re all very basic users that turn off their computer every time they are done, it never came up.
It would be my only issue with Mint for beginners. If they leave their computer running and come back later, there’s a slight chance that the screensaver will either not be started, or very difficult to exit.
Mint has been my go-to, except for a couple of people who ended up with pop!_os… mostly cause I showed them some options and that’s the one they thought looked cool lol
What are this options? I just switched to mint yesterday. I had a spare hard drive and a 12 year old computer not being used. The 120gb ssd is lightning fast compared to the old 1tb HD and it turned this old broken uselessness into a slick new machine. But I’m almost a complete newbie at Linux so mint/cinnamon it is.
Mint is always my go to safe suggestion.
Are you committing to having her Linux setup to do everything her windows can do? Mint would be good at that point.
If like most people they only really need a browser, Linux Mint. If they’re more of a power user, let them try a few DEs (Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, XFCE) and choose a distro based on which they prefer.
if it helps, as a lifetime Windows user I installed Linux Mint on an old laptop a few weeks ago, and used it for a week while travelling, and it went well :D It’s just different enough from Windows to have a bit of a learning curve, but nothing too scary.
Depends what their level of technical comfort is. A friend of mine just got switched over to Kubuntu because it was Windows flavored enough for him to make the jump. He’s more comfortable with tech but wasn’t a Linux daily driver prior to that though.
For others, yeah, Mint is probably what I’d aim for. It kinda depends on the target demographic.
