A friend might let me install Linux on his secondary laptop he uses for university. He’s not a tinkerer and wants something that just works.

Linux Mint is known for being very user-friendly and stable. Also easy to get help online.

However, in my opinion Mint seems rather outdated, both with its Windows-like workflow, default icons and look and also Xorg. When I tried it I had some screen stuttering I couldn’t resolve, probably due to Xorg.

Instead, Fedora with GNOME is very elegant and always uses the newest technologies. It feels and looks actually nice and not outdated. But I’d have to install media codecs via terminal first which suggests that Fedora is for experienced users. Also university wifi eduroam doesn’t work on Fedora for me because legacy TLS connection is not supported in Fedora (at least I couldn’t get it to work). I’m at a different uni than him tho, so it might work there. In general, less help on the web for Fedora than Mint.

What do you think? (Btw, KDE is too convoluted in my opinion. Manjaro too, it breaks too often. I will not consider it.)

EDIT: From what I’ve gathered so far, I should probably install Mint. He can try Fedora with a live usb or on my laptop. If he prefers that then I can warn him that this may be less stable and ask what he wants.

I’ve only tried Ubuntu-based Mint, but LMDE is more future-proof so it will probably be that.

  • Uvine_Umarylis
    35•1 year ago

    Fedora is not for beginners.

    Mint is.

    I could go into more detail, but I’ll leave it there.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      Mint has very nice tooling but its a weird Ubuntu derivate. One day a specific software doesnt install, or you have an XOrg problem that will never be fixed, or standard updates simply break something, and then…

      Mint is nice and easy to get going, but its outdated a lot, and uses a Distro model that I dont like to install on random laptops that are never updated.

      • Uvine_Umarylis
        3•1 year ago

        So you’re a power user? Case in point, you’d be better for Fedora.

        Also my second distro was mint, after 3+ years of the old hdd’s non-use, I pulled it out last year when my install of some OS broke, updated it to zero issues (I was curious), used the software for a bit, all was good.

        3 years without an update to zero issues.

        Haven’t seen any issue with Mint updates yet like I’ve fought in Fedora

        • @Pher
          1•1 year ago

          Power users do not care about the distro, linux is linux, they will compile everything how they like it.