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However, in my opinion Mint seems rather outdated, both with its Windows-like workflow, default icons and look and also Xorg.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 It feels and looks actually nice and not outdated.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.
@mintycactus @jack silverblue is not more user friendly than mint, not by any metric. A system with an immutable file system simply cannot be so. The immutability of the system often adds levels of complexity that an average person would have trouble understanding
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@mintycactus to you and me that’s true, but to a person just starting with Linux, it could be complex. I think systems like Silverblue, Vanilla OS, and NixOS are great, but I would not suggest them to a new user of Linux.
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@mintycactus NixOS can install to your hard drive. I have it on my laptop and it runs beautifully. I have issues with Gnome and their insistence on removing things like remembering window size and positions, and recently making it so hard to theme, but I am sure these will iron out with time.
My plasma desktop, however, is my favorite. Once I got it where I wanted it, it just worked so well and looked so good that I recommend it to everyone (BigLinux with KDE)
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@mintycactus my experience, as I cannot speak for yours, is that people I have taught about Linux have more easily adapted to Cinnamon than any other. I usually install it on something Arch based, though!
For my personal tastes, Cinnamon Na d Mate both feel old. Like I am in the 90s.