But giving advice with Linux is hard. There are so many options.
Like
do I recommend Linux mint, where the packages are rock solid and tested, and upgrades work pretty well, but it is also very outdated, limited and relies on XOrg?
or Fedora Atomic Desktops, where there are some presets I would always need to change, and where I would always need to layer packages to have a base OS that I can live with? Which is rock solid and great, but the packages are still often too new, online tutorials will often be useless, and you may have some missing package support (okay Distrobox)
or traditional Fedora, which also has often unstable packages, dnf is often unusable, but it is more versatile and supports dual-booting (with Windows)
or Ubuntu, which is very opinionated and I would run unsnap and more, deviate from the defaults, but have more tested packages, I hope? But there will be no chance for a no-snap atomic/image-based variant?
The distro part is actually kinda easy. In my mind there’s only a few distros that should ever be considered by a new user. Fedora, or Ubuntu/Mint/Pop!_OS. The last three are effectively the same thing under the hood and all of them will do the job.
The real hard question is which desktop environment. Plasma is generally my go to suggestion. I feel it follows a tried and true paradigm for UI and UX. It’s incredibly polished, fast, and very full featured. The one that really sticks out as odd to me is gnome and is the one that I would never recommend. I wouldn’t discourage, just not recommend.
Absolutely.
But giving advice with Linux is hard. There are so many options.
Like
My experience with dnf is that it’s slow as molasses but your average computer user isn’t gonna install 10 new CLI apps per day /j
I’ve used Discover (dnf or flatpack backend) and you can install just about any software with 1 click. It takes a minute to install but that’s fine.
My issue with dnf is the distro upgrade being completely broken.
While on Fedora Atomic, Distro upgrades are just another rebase. It is so much simpler and just works.
Zypper: hold my beer (it will be warm and flat by the time I’m done)
Can’t wait for Rypper, the drop-in Zypper replacement written in Rust
The distro part is actually kinda easy. In my mind there’s only a few distros that should ever be considered by a new user. Fedora, or Ubuntu/Mint/Pop!_OS. The last three are effectively the same thing under the hood and all of them will do the job.
The real hard question is which desktop environment. Plasma is generally my go to suggestion. I feel it follows a tried and true paradigm for UI and UX. It’s incredibly polished, fast, and very full featured. The one that really sticks out as odd to me is gnome and is the one that I would never recommend. I wouldn’t discourage, just not recommend.
Plasma on Kubuntu is still outdated, so I would exclude all versions of Ubuntu LTS.
Fedora ships really fresh packages, I wouldnt want to use non-Atomic Fedora anymore.
I just say “I hate you” before I walk away
How dare they make me think
Avoid Ubuntu.