My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
At my work, I convinced my boss to let us use Linux on a couple machines and, you guessed it: Mint. Everyone pretty much knows where to find things and it’s stable as a rock.
What is the persons skill level and are both of you OK with you picking up the slack?
She’s a pretty proficient windows user who mentioned looking at kbuntu. She can probably handle some rough edges on her own, but I have no interest in long term support. So probably mint 🤣
I use kubuntu. It’s a good choice for people who don’t have experience but are able and willing to search for answers.
KDE defaults are solid and utilizes a lot of Windows muscle memory, and being based on Ubuntu means that it’s really easy to search for answers on virtually any question you might have. Plus widespread package support
Whichever one you wind up with, Dolphin as a file manager blows the monstrosity that windows has out of the water. For someone who’s eeked out some power/efficiency out of windows usage it should be very pleasant finding out the standard software available for Linux these can almost always make you more efficient with less effort.
If you want to do the least amount of tech support: Fedora Kinoite.
Mint
Bazzite for young people, Mint for old people would be my first thought
Linux Mint is by far the smoothest experience I’ve had so far in trying Nobara, Debian, Manjaro otherwise.
Depends on the user. An older family member, Linux mint. A gamer, cachyOS. Otherwise fedora could also be an option. But in most cases, the person would choose and install a distro themselves if they are interested and that means that mint becomes the most common answer to the question.
Fedora. That’s what I run on my laptop and it’s great.
Something immutable and auto updating, likely Fedora based because that’s what I use.
Linux Mint Debian Edición if the laptop is not brand new.
Bodhi!
I put Mint on my brother’s laptop when his hard drive died, he’s not a techie sort of person at all and has had no complaints.
Fedora Atomic.
Updates are stable.
They can’t fuck it up.
Respectfully huge disagree. Standard Fedora would be better (and is my personal recommendation) since a bunch of administrative command syntax would be different with Atomic. The internet’s going to show troubleshooting advice for the former 9 times out of 10.
You just described exactly why I would install an Atomic distribution.
So they can’t run something they don’t understand, and end up nuking their install.
The biggest differences in usage (dnf vs rpm-ostree) essentially function as a knowledge/intelligence filter to prevent fuckups.
Everything I value is against “how long it will work without issue”, “how quick is an update”, and finally “how much effort do I need to help maintain it”.
Atomic systems have netted me positives on all my values. The people I know who used atomic, have only approached me due to edge cases such as specific laptop fan issues, which weren’t hindered by the atomic system.
I’d say mint is great for non tech people (90% of the time it’s the DE and GUI apps that are important rather than the distro, but mint has good ones by default). For former windows power users I’d recommend CachyOS or Fedora. Either way, you can boot from USB for any of these as a live demo; I have images for all 3 + memtest on my ventoy USB.
Ideally it would be a laptop/distro pairing that is officially supported by the laptop vendor. For better or worse, I think most often the distro is Ubuntu or Red Hat.
I’ve never used for-fee subscription distros like Ubuntu Pro or RHE, but if someone had the money to burn and a viable use case, I wouldn’t stop them.
