I need to install an OS for someone whose first impulse upon seeing a screen is to touch it, because they are young and their first assumption is a touchscreen.

They know their way around Windows and Windows is probably tought to them at school, so Windows might actually be the smart move… but I fucking hate it.

Is ZorinOS or similar polished enough that I can leave it to someone whose tech literacy is centered around Roblox, TikTok and evading parental locks? I don’t want to normalize the Windows-bullshit. But I don’t want their first Linux-experience to be frustrating.

  • Mike@lemm.ee
    3·
    1 day ago

    I followed the path Mint>Fedora>openSUSE.

    Wanna know my experience? I had issues daily with screen tearing on mint, even though I had the NVIDIA drivers they were probably too old on Mint for my graphics card. The desktop wouldn’t load, I had errors on starting and on shutting down Mint. I spent more time troubleshooting Mint than working.

    I said fuck it and decided to give fedora (actually Universal Blue’s Aurora, which is atomic and fedora-based). It was pure bliss.

    Everything just worked out of the box to the point that I was confused as to why everything was working so well. The only thing I had to “learn” was how to use distrobox through BoxBuddy, which took a whopping 30 minutes of research or so.

    Now I moved to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it feels like going back in time. I know my OS is not as secure due to not being atomic, I have to run the command line daily for updates, and the initial setting up would have been intimidating for a beginner. But at least it also hasn’t given me problems yet, unlike what happened with Mint.

    So IMO Mint should definitely not be recommended to beginners. The architecture of atomic distros is very familiar to anyone who has a smartphone today, which is practically everyone. You can go to the software store and download Flatpaks as seamlessly as you do on the Google Play or Apple Store. You can even change the apps Permitions using Flatseal. And best of all, you get an OS that is secure, which traditional Linux distros aren’t due to every app having root access by default.

    I haven’t done it yet, but when my wife wants to change her laptop, I’ll 100% install a self-maintaining atomic distro for her.

    • crater2150@feddit.org
      1·
      4 hours ago

      And best of all, you get an OS that is secure, which traditional Linux distros aren’t due to every app having root access by default.

      What? Which distro runs everything as root by default?

      • Mike@lemm.ee
        1·
        2 hours ago

        In traditional distros, apps dependencies are mixed with system files. In atomic distros you use flatpaks which are containerized and don’t see system files.

        This is what I mean. I understand you can also install Flatpaks in traditional distros, but most people don’t install only flatpaks.

        • crater2150@feddit.org
          1·
          27 minutes ago

          I know that, but that does not give apps root access. Unless you mean something else by root access than being run with root privileges

    • Fecundpossum@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      23 hours ago

      Three years ago when I used Mint I had minimal issues, but it sounds like things have declined since then.

      My path went something like Pop_OS>Mint>Fedora Workstation>Mint>MXLinux>Nobara>EndeavourOS>Fedora Workstation for a solid year>and back to endeavour with hyprland.

      But that’s just the stuff I’ve installed and actually kept longer than a few days. I’ve installed silverblue, kinoite, openSUSE tumbleweed, bluefin, bazzite etc just to learn them, and honestly I just don’t see the use case for average users in atomic distros. Non atomic distros are entirely stable if you don’t do stupid things with them, and doing stupid things with them is a great learning experience.

      Same old Linux differences in opinion.