Anybody that already has had a computer for 2 years and is coming from Windows will have almost no problems with Mint. Stability is top priority for first time Linux users and you need some visual guide with screenshots. Mint also has a great default look and setup for people coming from Windows. Mint is probably the best distro to put on your mom’s old laptop that is “getting slow” because of viruses.
I’d recommend KDE Neon or Ubuntu also depending on the situation but if I don’t know anything about the person and computer I’d say Mint.
This is a bold statement considering how many daily Windows users don’t understand how to use Windows.
It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch tech enthusiasts are. How much does your average person know about their car? That’s how little they know about their computer.
They might not know what an OS even is, or how to identify where “Windows” ends and applications begin. They do what they bought it for, and if that doesn’t work, they take it to someone who knows how to get it working again. They know how to charge it, and to plug in a headset or USB key or something. If that functionality doesn’t work automatically or they encounter any issue, it might as well have exploded in their hands.
There are people who have been using Windows for 30 years that know literally nothing about it. Putting a “years of experience” metric on it is hilarious. It’s like assuming that if someone has been driving for 50 years that they know anything about cars besides how to drive it and where to put the gas.
Exactly. I know plenty of people who have driven a car for over 3 decades, and do not know what a timing belt or a spark plug does. I don’t look down on those people, but it certainly makes sense as to why they don’t know. They don’t really need to!
You should at least know how to change your oil and clean your car.
Most people get their oil changed at a shop, and drive through a car wash. I wouldn’t really consider those additional skills.
OpenSUSE Thumbleweed or KDE Neon.
Because Fedora is open source only to the point of it being pathological. If there isn’t am open source driver most time you’re just boned. Someone new is going to have a tough time with it, and the community is on average a very “lol rtfm” bunch. Not as bad as Arch, but that’s not saying much.
Meanwhile, despite the problems around Ubuntu, Debian communities are much more understanding and helpful. Mint even with old packages is going to be an easier time for a newbie. Certainly a newbie unfamiliar with the way entirely too much of the FOSS community is.
Which is why I ask people one simple question: do they plan to game. If they plan to game, I don’t recommend them Mint. If they aren’t, I recommend them Mint.
I installed Mint (no idea mint was old tbh) looked into Gentoo and tried the live boot USB option. 'This looks nice, no how do I install" The install option opened a web page (gentoo wiki) with several options for guides based on various permutations. All options send you in a ring without actually telling me how to install.
I went back to Mint as it does the few things I need a PC to do these days:
Some kind of office suite with spreadsheet and word processor, Steam, Netflix and Prime, Firefox
Added bonus is that it runs MegaMek natively AND i don’t need to read pages of documentation, just click install.
All options send you in a ring without actually telling me how to install.
Don’t know. I was installing Gentoo in 6th grade of school with poorly-translated gentoo handbook.
EDIT: had wrong quote
If it doesn’t provide a benefit for them, why should they bother? I understand why a teenager would, I would have as a teenager. But as an adult? Who got time for this?
It was counterpoint to “send you in a ring without actually telling me how to install”. It does.
I also agree that installing it is rather lengthy.
Well you went from one of the easiest to one of the more complicated distros so thats not surprising. There’s a lot of distros thst are just as simple to install as mint, you don’t need to mess around with arch and gentoo unless you’re planning on becoming a real Linux enthusiast.
Why the fuck would you try Gentoo as a Linux noob? I am guessing no one told you it was for advanced Linux users only. Fedora and OpenSUSE are nowhere near as difficult to install as Gentoo, as they are made for normal users.
Gentoo was my second linux Distro ever some time in 2003 or 2004.
Installed it by printing out the full install doc, which was like 30 or 40 pages, and starting up a stage one install. I got through the entire install by following the instructions because the documentation was that good.
I remember having a problem and hopping on an irc chat to ask for help and people there being baffled about the basic level questions I was asking while having a working Gentoo install.
and starting up a stage one install.
Dear Faust.
Difficulty:
- Easy
- Medium
- Hard
- Nightmare
- > Novichok
I thought you went with minimalcd, opened handbook in links(browser) and installed stage3.
I remember having a problem and hopping on an irc chat to ask for help and people there being baffled about the basic level questions I was asking while having a working Gentoo install.
Self-perpetuating circle of “Gentoo is not for noobs” stereotype.
Yeah, even the “difficult” distributions tend to just be a matter of following instructions to get a working installation. Gentoo was a massive PITA to maintain though. Chances are I was missing some knowledge that would’ve simplified things, but I spent way too much time on maintenance for the system to actually be useful. Arch has been much kinder.
Gentoo is good at explaining how system works.
Ah, OpenSuse. The distro with the package management that spams your drive full of unnecessary optional dependencies.
Would always recommend EndeavourOS.
Sadly true. When I installed texlive-base it tried to install like 300 recommended packages, I almost accepted D:
I’d still recommend it, I don’t know if you can change the default for recommended packages because aside from that, I actually love it.
Yesss! My first five minutes with OpenSuse.
I mean, you can change that behaviour somehow. But there are so many other small things like the constant vendor changes. Zypper is just so quirky. It’s a cool distro and to have a rolling release option like tumbleweed is always a big plus in my opinion, but I just wouldn’t recommend it to people who are not really eager to play around with their distro.
What I find weird about Tumbleweed is, that updating is not integrated into YaST or another UI. You have to use the commandline to keep your system up to date. That makes it exactly as inconvenient as Arch for newcomers, but Arch has a whole philosophy behind this while SuSE is typically very GUI oriented. It’s weird.
With KDE Plasma it lets me update from its store, even though it’s kind of annoying because I like to do it from the CLI and it blocks Zypper when checking for available updates.
Tried it once and literally could not get nvidia drivers to install. Went straight back to endeavouros and continued to enjoy
Maybe you should have clicked on ‘nvidia repository’ in Yast. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Except that didn’t work
I recommend fedora to every one. It’s the correct kind of stable distro. The kernel updates are slow to roll out after being tested and all… But guess what version of plasma I have? 6.1. That’s just a few weeks later than arch got it.
Plus not to mention how easy setting up my Optimus gpu was because of rpmfusion. I have never had such ease with any other distro.
So I recommend fedora all the way.
Fedora (including Silverblue/Kionite) is hard to recommend as a first distro though. It’s an excellent platform when you know your end goal and how to get there, while providing “leading-edge” packages that’s great for gaming.
But a project like Bazzite? Phenomenal new user experience for gaming and a very easy recommend.
If you want a non-gaming alternative to Bazzite to recommend, there’s it’s two universal blue siblings, Aurora (general purpose desktop) and Bluefin (silverblue/workstation distro). They both have the same setup as Bazzite but without the explicitly gaming elements. https://universal-blue.org/
Bazzite is broken AF on Nvidia right now, with no X11 and no explicit sync driver. I can’t wait to see if driver 555 fixes it.
Edit - 555 is out, and yes it is considerably better.
Ouch, didn’t realize the Nvidia build was struggling. Hopefully it gets patched up soon.
If there’s a previous commit before the issue is introduced you can pin it and wait to unpin until the issue gets resolved.
I just switched it to x11 and it was fine.
I recently picked up an AMD GPU so I re-based to the regular one which was amazingly easy.
I have an Nvidia image and haven’t had these issues. I can run Wayland just fine. I believe they include X11 as well.
Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.
On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.
Because Mint is popular among the crowd, and such challenges are also driven by the crowd. Better to see it as some social or meme dynamics, than to explain it with logical reasons. I also see more new users who use arch, because of the “I use arch BTW” meme.
As a Fedora Silverblue user I find it hard to recommend it to new users. It’s not an issue with Fedora, but with the state of Linux desktop in general. At least with Mint/Ubuntu people can rely on social media and the community if they have problems. And Fedora is a more niche thing, and doesn’t have a big crowd.
Moreover, I chose Fedora because of my experience, which allows me to have opinion what is better. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to explain the years of the Linux desktop drama to new users, when they are just doing the first steps or trying to feed their curiosity.
Fedora a niche distro?
It is comparatively to Debian/Ubuntu derivatives. Even Arch and NixOS probably have more users now. Lately I see some popularity of uBlue derivatives among new users, but I don’t know how many people use it, and where the popularity comes from.
Because for most use cases, Mint works flawlessly. It changes little from time to time. It has all the drivers to get started with a wide range of common hardware. It has all the codecs to play common media formats.
Of course if the package update is too slow, it’s not for you, but then unlike you, most people don’t need the latest and greatest. They just need something that works from the get-go with predictable behavior.
The software I use doesn’t get significant updates often. Kennel, vi, grep, find? They’ve been around for decades.
I’m genuinely curious what kind of things people can’t do because of lag on package updates.
It usually has something to do with programming. Again, most cases, the versions in the packages included in your garden variety stable distros should cover most use cases.
However, once in a while one would encounter the need of using the cutting edge features on certain compiler or interpreter. Rust comes to mind. I know Python introduced some features that could drastically alter workflow (e.g. switch statement). NodeJS is another one known to be lagging behind from time to time.
In other cases, hardware support might be taken to consideration, especially for newer machines. However, with Mint including the optional newer kernel, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Modem hardware.
The default kernel Mint has installed isn’t new enough to support cards like the 7900 XT. Though this can be fixed by updating the kernel using Mint’s kernel version utility
Hmm vim is the reason I dropped all debian based distros. Cause I wanted v8 when it was released but sorry you have to wait 2-4 years. Wasn’t in the mood for compiling it myself so just went with arch based distro and haven’t looked back since.
Linux users can’t even agree on what distro is actually beginner friendly, so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
Linux users can’t even agree […] so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
Easy. You make a post like the OP, count the positive mentions of distros in the comments, and bam, you have your distro of choice. It’s called the Linux newbie roulette and works kind of like the magic hat in Harry Potter that sorts you into your house.
That’s really depending on your use cases, for example if I want to install distro for my grandma use Mint, for a graphic guy (as in this example) use Arch or Fedora (or even OpenSUSE), etc.
Linux is a niche. Picking any distro that isn’t the most popular is going one step deeper into a niche. A niche, within a niche.
Just use the most popular distro… Ubuntu
Problem solved.
I fucking hate Ubuntu. Mostly because you’re right.
Ubuntu isn’t the most popular and hasn’t been for a while. It actually has a lot of issues new users are likely to run into, including lots of spurious error messages. Apparently the top 5 according to distro watch is: MX Linux, Mint, EndeavorOS, Debian, and Manjaro.
So essentially debian, arch and ubuntu derivatives.
I’m sorry, I can’t believe that MX Linux and EndeavorOS are popular or recommended. I’ve never heard of those or seen any recommendations for that.
I’ve seen Mint recommended.
People pushing arch on newbies? Wtf?
If you haven’t heard of EndeavorOS that’s because you are out of the loop. Entirely your issue. It’s a much better alternative to Manjaro essentially.
Also that’s general popularity according to page hits, nothing to do with newbies. Newbies aren’t the majority of Linux users.
Not that there is anything wrong with recommending EndeavorOS to Newbies. The whole point of arch derivatives like that is to make installing arch simpler and easier for the user. Arch is actually a better base distro imo than say Ubuntu for this. It has packages for pretty much anything in the AUR, no digging up PPAs for everything. Likewise it’s all up-to-date too.
I don’t remember MX Linux ever being that popular before, but maybe I am out of the loop.
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I know its one of the strengths of Linux, but I can’t help but laugh that the response to “you can’t agree on one, how can I?” is for several people to suggest several distros.
Isn’t red hat enough reason to not use fedora?
Not really. Fedora is community run.
Red hat I can live with. The problem is IBM.
Because choosing a distro to begin with isn’t easy. Ask ten people and you’ll get eleven suggestions.
wait Mint was (and still is) out of date?
The kernel is too old for newer AMD gpu drivers to work, but switching to a newer kernel isn’t too hard. I had to when I built a new computer last winter, but I have also used various *nixes for a good long time.
Knowing how to discover you need a newer kernel is a bit tough for recent convert, though.
What problems?
outdated mesa, monitor scaling, cinnamon in general being outdated
What features were lacking from mesa or Cinnamon generally?
I have 4k 1440, 1080 monitor (120hz or higher) on Mint edge, what would I gain from switch to somethibg else?
plasma has wayland support, tons of customizability, better multi monitor support, a great suite of applications including a text editor with lsp support and much more, and in general looks nicer. cinnamon is sort of the bare minimum
better multi monitor support
I run a 3x1 setup and KDE didn’t handle it any better than Cinnamon did.
Wayland support is coming to Mint. You can actually use it on 21.3 right now but it is unstable.
Rest of what you said is opinion.
Wayland has objectively better multi monitor support in every case. You were encountering tearing issues before switching, maybe you just didn’t notice.
Well, I got rid of KDE and I’m on Cinnamon right now, so where are these tearing issues? You think I would have noticed after over a year of use.
the rest also isn’t just an opinion, cinnamon does not have an equivalent to kdenlive, krita, or kate. even the existing applications are just not on the same level. it’s an acceptable desktop, but plasma and gnome are just better.
I use KdenLive on Mint whenever I need to edit a video. I’ve never bothered to look for the other two because I use Darktable and GIMP for my photo editing, but I can check to see if they’re available if you want me to.
Why would I care what software KDE comes with? This is Linux. I can install whatever works best for me. Including the whole of KDE software suite if I so chose. You KDE fans are voracious.
Does that include support for variable refresh rate with multiple monitor (Freesync in my case).
mesa is outdated by default, not supporting rx 7000 cards unless you use the edge iso.
If you have new hardware, why wouldn’t you use the Edge ISO?
why should you have to? it’s a really bad choice by the distro maintainers.
Can you explain? As a Mint user with really old hardware, I appreciate using the LTS kernel. However, I also appreciate them giving users other options.
there is no benefit to old lts kernels on the desktop, kernel releases are always extremely stable
Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.
That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.
I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.
We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.
I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.
AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.
Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.
Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.
For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.
Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.
