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!
I guess a good question would be what software you plan on using. If it’s something more reliant on frequent updates and feature releases like gaming, the choice would be a bit different compared to something like office work or common browsing, where stability would be prioritized (at the cost of slower updates).
Mint, for example, is a great jumping off point for Windows users because of the familiar User Interface and a focus on stability and lack of prior knowledge required - but it lags behind when it comes to cutting edge stuff for things like gaming.
Since Mrs. Erinaceus is considering switching, I was going to try and steer her towards Mint, but since she’s a gamer and I’m not (I know, boring) perhaps this would not be the best choice? Please tell me more.
Went with Bazzite for my main gaming rig almost a year ago. Really good all-round distro imo. Haven’t had an issue yet. NixOS for my other machines because it’s cool and I can have them fit for many purposes by just switching a single config file.
Nix is new to me, but what I’ve read seems like it’s very polarizing. Curious what kind of real world use makes it a good choice?
Curious what kind of real world use makes it a good choice?
It’s declarative. Everything is (usually) configured via Nix itself, without requiring manual steps of running additional commands. This ends up being pretty useful when you have a fleet of devices that you want to configure.
Changing config is atomic. If you end up breaking your system when trying to tweak it, you can boot into the previous generation and try again with different settings.
Like 9limmer mentioned, Bazzite would be a good gaming focused choice for a beginner. There are alternatives like CatchyOS, but those are geared towards more experienced users.
I just switched a couple months ago to Pop OS because it is supposed to be more up to date on Nvidia drivers and game stuff. I haven’t tested to many games yet but the couple I did worked fine. I was going to go with Mint originally but the gaming thing sold me on Pop. Its been pretty smooth but I would like more built in setting options for customizations.
Fedora because it just works.
I’d suggest 0 change at first : boot on a live USB then connect with her Web accounts (e.g. Firefox Profile) then get an easy win. Sure not 100% will work but she’ll be 80% there in minutes. If she hates it, logout, reboot, remove key and that’s it.
OpenSuse of course
I don’t ever want to have to set up my PC again. Will Tumbleweed be good to accomplish this for a user used to Windows?
You can go with the Slowroll version which is Tumbleweed but with a week delayed updates which might prevent issues in updates you’d have on Tumbleweed. Personally, been with Tumbleweed for a year now and haven’t had issues with updates.
You need to apply the update from time to time. You’ll have to teach the user to do that. But you can create a simple alias in the terminal so they don’t have to remember the update commands (system update and flatpak update cmds).
Yes, and Aeon would even be better. Anything is just a box throw away.
I’m not sure what that last part means, but TY.
On atomic distros, you install stuff mostly via flatpak and distrobox. I’d even recommend using distrobox on traditional systems because you can just kill the box if you don’t want it any longer. You can have multiple package managers at the same time installed without problems, e.g. yay, dnf and zypper. I guess you could even take your box with you when switching to a new distro (e.g. when switching from atomic fedora to opensuse as I did recently) but I have not yet done that.
Yes, management could be more end user friendly, but it’ll get there
Thx for the explainer - I have some research to do.
I like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed: everything’s up to date and it’s very stable for a rolling distro. Very occasionally an update is problematic but there are easy rollbacks thanks to btrfs. KDE Plasma is an easy desktop environment for a former Windows user too. One weirdness is you’ll have to get used to using the command line to update native packages and Flatpaks (“sudo zypper dup” and “sudo flatpak update”), because the GUI updater apparently isn’t really intended for the rolling distro.
omnixy, a NixOS fork of omarchy (which aims to serve the best defaults) that isn’t maintained by a fascist
Always great to see more people curious about Linux, especially when the motivation is escaping ms-bullshit…
If she wants something that just works but still feels polished and professional, I’d actually give openSUSE a look. Leap is rock-solid and perfect for people who want a stable system that behaves consistently and doesn’t demand much maintenance. Tumbleweed, on the other hand, is rolling release, so it’s always up to date but still surprisingly reliable thanks to openSUSE’s testing process.
Both use YaST, which is one of the best control panels in the Linux world. You can do a lot with YaST, like manage users, partitions, updates, drivers, and networking all from one place without ever touching the terminal.
Mint is also a fine choice as well…
Gentoo
Well quite obvious: as the name “Debian” was coined to celebrate the union between Debra and Ian, makes it a de facto choice! ;)
They split up :-(
I think Ian later died
I can recommend Debian or Fedora. They are both mature distros that are pretty easy to install and generally work well with minimal fuss and are easy to maintain. I often see Linux Mint recommend, including in this thread. I’ve never used it so I can’t speak to it. But I have every reason to believe it’s a solid choice.
As for transfer process, since you mention using spare disks, NTFS filesystems are supported and you may be able to just copy files off of them. I don’t know if bitlocker is supported.
Come on gang! We all know the real answer is Hannah Montana!
openSUSE.
Bazzite
I would get so much shit for this 😂 I’m tempted
Fedora Silverblue (GNOME) or Kinoite (KDE) are great for a “hands-off” OS. They are atomic so very hard to accidentally fuck up the system. Apps are installed easily via the GUI software center. I tried both when I switched to Linux and found I loved the simple but powerful and delightful-to-use experience of the GNOME desktop.
Yeah I have two Linux machines, the laptop which is my tinkering machine and the desktop that other people use that I’m not allowed to break, and I run Kinoite on that one because it’s pretty hard to do anything to mess it up. At least I haven’t managed it so far lol.
Show her some pictures or videos of DEs and see what she likes. If she’s someone who likes to make it look the way she wants, she might get a bit more out of KDE than Cinnamon for example.
