Please I beg of you, just recommend people Mint. Catchy is great, it’s very easy and smooth as arch goes.
But if you have someone who is under the illusion that Linux is hard. The moment they have any issue it might frustrate them enough to bounce off. I know so many people who have gotten recommended some flavor of the week like Manjaro, Bazite, Pop_Os or Nobara, who that has happened with. I’ve never talked to anyone who was recommended Mint with Cinnamon, used it, and then decided it was too hard and went back to windows. Plenty of people will say “well I used XYZ and didn’t have any issues” or the issues were minor enough and the answers easy enough that they stuck around, but that’s survivorship bias, the people who didn’t deal with it aren’t here to say otherwise.
So just send them to cinnamon mint, there will be no hiccups, it will just work. Maybe later they’ll be like “yah, I kind of want to see what else is out there” and then they can try other things. I get that, cinnamon mint is limited in some ways, but not in ways a first time Linux user is going to care about.
The first person I met who used Mint was asking me how to fix his Nvidia output stutter lol.
The answer was updated kernel shenanigans which is probably Mint’s only weakness.
Anyways, that’s usually why I recommend Fedora since I think it properly fits the same spot where Ubuntu was like 15 years ago. Cutting edge stable, large community, and much easier support than something more downstream.
That being said, a good chunk of users have been quite happy with stuff like Bazzite and CachyOS because they’re mostly here to play games.
But yeah I agree, the popular recommendations of the week really need to be ignored for first time users. I still remember when they were pretty much all just Ubuntu downstreams that never fixed any of the upstream issues that Canonical created, which led to a ton of youtubers thinking Linux stability was behind.
On a similar note, it’s also why I recommend literally any DE except GNOME. It looks and functions like a knockoff ChromeOS tablet, despite the fact that it used to be the home of Compiz 15+ years ago, which is the peak of desktop UX lol.
Even though I happily run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed myself, I have run into the occasional “What the ever-loving heck” issue that I’ve had to stubbornly troubleshoot, and I worry that’d make some people run away crying.
I have a family member with a really old laptop enjoying Mint, but my wife’s and my best buddy’s gaming PCs might be worth giving Fedora a shot on.
Like me, they need those updated Nvidia drivers and Wayland, and honestly most importantly for familiarity + cool-new-thing factor: KDE plasma 6! ;)
Zorin OS is also a good choice if they have a high resolution screen, because Mint’s Cinnamon desktop has awful screen tearing when you increase the scaling.
The screen tearing from UI scaling being at an uneven interval has been fixed with the switch to Wayland. Screen tearing can still happen but it’s due to something being messed up in the rendering pipeline and not an issue particular to mint.
Most drivers are just in the Linux kernel so updating it will fix issues with them, unless the drivers can’t be bundled in to the kernel for license conflict reasons. In which case they need to be updated manually.
Mint has a GUI program for managing drivers that aren’t in the kernel. It actually has a GUI program for most things that would normally need commands in the terminal. Which is why I think it’s kind of insane to recommend anything else to people who aren’t familiar with using a command line interface.
Please I beg of you, just recommend people Mint. Catchy is great, it’s very easy and smooth as arch goes.
But if you have someone who is under the illusion that Linux is hard. The moment they have any issue it might frustrate them enough to bounce off. I know so many people who have gotten recommended some flavor of the week like Manjaro, Bazite, Pop_Os or Nobara, who that has happened with. I’ve never talked to anyone who was recommended Mint with Cinnamon, used it, and then decided it was too hard and went back to windows. Plenty of people will say “well I used XYZ and didn’t have any issues” or the issues were minor enough and the answers easy enough that they stuck around, but that’s survivorship bias, the people who didn’t deal with it aren’t here to say otherwise.
So just send them to cinnamon mint, there will be no hiccups, it will just work. Maybe later they’ll be like “yah, I kind of want to see what else is out there” and then they can try other things. I get that, cinnamon mint is limited in some ways, but not in ways a first time Linux user is going to care about.
I’ve been using Linux for 20 years: Ubuntu, Arch, elementaryOS, etc. I’ve tried and used a bunch of them.
But I need to get work done. I don’t have time to tinker anymore.
I’ve switched to Mint last year. Best choice ever. It just works, easy peasy.
The first person I met who used Mint was asking me how to fix his Nvidia output stutter lol.
The answer was updated kernel shenanigans which is probably Mint’s only weakness.
Anyways, that’s usually why I recommend Fedora since I think it properly fits the same spot where Ubuntu was like 15 years ago. Cutting edge stable, large community, and much easier support than something more downstream.
That being said, a good chunk of users have been quite happy with stuff like Bazzite and CachyOS because they’re mostly here to play games.
But yeah I agree, the popular recommendations of the week really need to be ignored for first time users. I still remember when they were pretty much all just Ubuntu downstreams that never fixed any of the upstream issues that Canonical created, which led to a ton of youtubers thinking Linux stability was behind.
On a similar note, it’s also why I recommend literally any DE except GNOME. It looks and functions like a knockoff ChromeOS tablet, despite the fact that it used to be the home of Compiz 15+ years ago, which is the peak of desktop UX lol.
I hear a lot of love for Fedora.
Even though I happily run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed myself, I have run into the occasional “What the ever-loving heck” issue that I’ve had to stubbornly troubleshoot, and I worry that’d make some people run away crying.
I have a family member with a really old laptop enjoying Mint, but my wife’s and my best buddy’s gaming PCs might be worth giving Fedora a shot on.
Like me, they need those updated Nvidia drivers and Wayland, and honestly most importantly for familiarity + cool-new-thing factor: KDE plasma 6! ;)
Zorin OS is also a good choice if they have a high resolution screen, because Mint’s Cinnamon desktop has awful screen tearing when you increase the scaling.
The screen tearing from UI scaling being at an uneven interval has been fixed with the switch to Wayland. Screen tearing can still happen but it’s due to something being messed up in the rendering pipeline and not an issue particular to mint.
Zorin user here. Might switch to Mint. Might not help, but after almost 2 years, I still don’t know what I’m doing.
Unless it’s flatpak.
But like, I have no idea how to update my bluetooth driver. And I really want to.
There are other utilities that I can’t install. It’s like the tools you need to install to make linux easy still need terminal to install.
It’s all “you’re missing prerequesits. They won’t be installed”.
So you need to be smart enough in linux to install the tools to make it easy, but if you knew how to install the tools, you wouldn’t need them.
Most drivers are just in the Linux kernel so updating it will fix issues with them, unless the drivers can’t be bundled in to the kernel for license conflict reasons. In which case they need to be updated manually.
Mint has a GUI program for managing drivers that aren’t in the kernel. It actually has a GUI program for most things that would normally need commands in the terminal. Which is why I think it’s kind of insane to recommend anything else to people who aren’t familiar with using a command line interface.