Couldn’t find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it’s ok to ask here.
A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend’s kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can’t play Factorio.
For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can’t easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don’t spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn’t seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.
- Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
- Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
- Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn’t need to be “kid proof”, I don’t think he touches any stuff he doesn’t know what it does.
Here are some of my default picks: Nobara, Fedora KDE, Linux Mint. Can’t go wrong with either
I love Nobara, but it regularly breaks between updates (though everything is usually fixed within 3 hours).
I’m using Fedora KDE on my own PC, and it has been soft-bricked by updates multiple times, or by doing seemingly trivial things like choosing a theme from the built-in store. Seems quite unstable to me so it’s not something I would recommend to someone without the ability to repair their OS from a terminal.
I’ve said this many times, and will continue saying this again and again:
When in doubt: Linux Mint will provide everything you’ll need. You can distrohop once you understand the basics, customizations and optimizations can come later.
That hardware is very powerful, so Linux Mint (maybe Debian Edition) will do the trick.
Mint.
I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.
Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma. My dad’s been running it for five years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”). It was also my son’s first OS when he was about 8.
Mint was my first thought as well. Haven’t used it myself but in the past I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be very user friendly and stable, though I’m not really up to date on Linux distros so I wanted to check if this was still was true (which is seems to be) and if there were any new options.
Try an immutable os like Bazzite.
I have a kid about that age interested in games. There was definitely interest in social pressure to switch to Windows for gaming for the bigger selection and what friends were playing.
Pop!_OS might also be an option.
I’d hold off on Pop! OS for the moment, until they have Cosmic into an updated release.
I say this as a relatively happy user of Pop
Windows 95b
Windows lmao
Sounds like SteamOS might work? https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/
Do you know how mature it is as a desktop OS? I saw the official FAQ does recommend against using it as such. I tried it on a HTPC a few years ago but at that point it didn’t seem very usable outside of Steam’s full screen UI.
Majority of AAA games run invasive software like kernel-level anticheat, I’d personally recommend js buying him a PS5 or running them in VMs (Linux or windows).
