with the recent windows news, I wanna switch to Linux. I tried mint a few years ago and was annoyed and frustrated with multiple things, like having to input the password all the time and the general ammunt of constant trouble shooting and needing a tutorial for the most basic things.
I want a distro that:
- Is very user friendly, ideally not requiring a terminal
- Is hard to accidentally fuck up
- ideally doesn’t require a password for every input
I basically just use my laptop to browse the web, draw in krita and use ms office apps (have been getting used to open office lately)
What do y’all suggest?
It looks like you want SteamOS. I recommend either getting a Steam Deck, wait for the Steam Machine or install it compatible hardware if you have any. No Nvidia GPUs.
SteamOS checks all three requirements for the most part, maybe 3 not so much. But it will be near impossible to fuck it up as it has a read-only filesystem and all apps are installed through flatpak which are sandboxed similar to apps on iOS.
Based on those requirements, honestly, I’d recommend a Mac. Very user friendly, no terminal, very, very hard to fuck up, and only needs authentication when you’re changing system settings.
Macs do things a little differently, so you’ll have to learn the Apple way, but generally it’s all very dead simple point and click.
When I started my Linux journey a couple of years ago, I tried lots of distros and experienced some of the same frustrations. The distro that hooked me and just worked was Pop! OS. It was very user friendly, didn’t require any fiddling, it just worked. Later I wanted a more up-to-date system, and after trying several distros I settled with Fedora.
Other thoughts: …be sure to install Timeshift (system rollback app). …my experience is that gnome desktop is easier, cleaner, less tweaking and less overwhelming than kde.
+1 for Fedora.
I started my Linux journey back in 2011 with Arch on my MacBookPro 17". I had a great time and enjoyed the steep learning curve, but around 2018 I needed something that just worked to keep myself from fiddling to much with the OS and get to work on other tasks, and settled for Fedora. The last few years i have very much enjoyed Fedora Silverblue, but there are still a couple of sharp edges around video codecs and the browser. But that is about it.
Fedora keeps me productive!
What’s your favorite color? Pick the distro with that color in their logo.
90% of the reason I’ve ended up with Manjaro
First, try LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; it is a highly maintained fork of the latter, with plenty of improvements. Another thing is, even if there are GUIs for everything, do not be afraid of using the terminal! As another commenter noted, it can even be easier. As for passwords, it is like that for security purposes; if you disable it, you’ll be at a higher risk of breaking something.
I’d suggest you don’t listen to anyone in this thread and don’t switch.
You don’t want to learn how to use linux, you want to keep using windows and you’re trying to do something about it now because the clock has run out on you. Go to massgrave.dev/windows10_eol and follow the instructions to get esu updates for three years or do an in place switch to iot ltsc 2021 and get updates for eight years.
During those years, branch out a little and try using a mac or linux on their own terms. Neither will be an easy switch, you’ll have to retrain your muscle memory and you will absolutely have to learn to use the terminal if you wanna use linux but especially if you have someone who can help you in person, you can easily get switched over.
Thanks, right now I do have w11 and I’m fine with it. I have uninstalled one drive and other bloatware, the thing that is making me want to quit is the potential forced ai shit.
Downgrading to w10 is an escape route that seems the most valid, it feels like asking Linux communities is counter productive, because I specifically don’t want to have my OS be a hobby, but I’m asking OS hobbyists…
If Microsoft goes the way of AI slop, Apple will soon follow so I don’t see that helping me much
It’s honestly an upgrade to go back to 10 and for me it was an upgrade to go to iot ltsc because literally everything that’s annoying about windows is not there including ads, preinstalled apps, news, weather etc. I have done a few installs of it for other people who want some of that stuff and it can be added back but in terms of clean, crisp taste, those mountains are blue.
I’ve used everything for a long time and you’re never going to get away from needing the terminal in linux because everything is a wrapper for something you can do in the terminal and if you need to communicate what to do it’s easier to say “type “sudo journalctl —since today | grep /dev/sda” and tell me what errors it’s giving” than to figure out what desktop environment, window manager, file manager, log system, log viewer and text editor a person is using or has installed and walk em through installing and using each of those to troubleshoot the same issue. So any two linux users will eventually triangulate down to the terminal unless they’re discussing things specific to guis.
If you’re looking to avoid ai, apple is a better bet than Microsoft just because of the money flow. It’s always gonna be hard to get away from ai on the platform that makes its money through ai, ads and web services as opposed to the one that takes a cut of App Store sales and charges for hardware.
There’s also the positioning of each company in their own words, Microsoft selling itself as the ai computer and Apple selling itself as the private and secure computer. We can’t trust what corporations say, but their presentation has to be believable or no one would buy their stuff and their self talk can tell us things about them.
+1 for Bazzite (or another one from https://universal-blue.org/ ), very hard to destroy, if an update breaks something just choose old install during boot and wait a few weeks before trying again. I am kinda savvy but don’t really need (or can 😸) tinker with the system.
Where are you based? Maybe someone from https://endof10.org/ or another local hacker grouo could help you in person. There are regular install parties in my city.
Zorin is user friendly. You may still need to use a password for doing updates.
If you game, then probably Bazzite.
If you hate the command line you could try tumbleweed, you will have Yast2 GUI apps for everything yo want to alter on the system. And it has automatic snapshotting if out you mess things up, you can boot to a previous snapshot. Howeverits will require a password whenever you want to make system changes. And a learning curve compared to other distros.
Not really getting away from typing a password, that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
As someone who uses and likes tumbleweed I don’t know if I would recommend it for inexperienced users. Once you start adding third party repositories for things like video codecs, dependency issues can get really nasty. Zypper will always offer you solutions to resolve them, but if you aren’t careful which one you select you can easily do stuff like accidentally remove your network driver which is a very annoying problem to have
Shhh don’t tell them about 3rd party repos. That’s why I somewhat disclaimed it with the Learning Curve, but having yast and snapper for me onboard as a new Linux user was very helpful.
Yeah but you kind of need codecs from packman or you’re going to have a bad time if you want like streaming or video calls. Unless more things are included out of the box now?
The inclusion of open H264 was helpful.
that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
All a malicious script has to do is alias
sudoin your .bashrc, and you’re fucked. The script can do that without privileges. It takes surprisingly little to go from “I’m only running this script without privileges” to getting totally owned immediately after.I guess that depends on distro, because sudo on OpenSUSE requires root password, so a script isn’t doing anything unless you enter the password
Yes, every distro requires a password for sudo. That’s the whole point of it. But editing .bashrc does not require sudo. You can add aliases and functions to .bashrc. A malicious script can append to .bashrc, and by doing so, it can alias sudo to be whatever command it wants. For instance, a malicious function. So the next time you run sudo it runs the malicious command, instead, which itself can act just like sudo and prompt you for your password. So now you just entered your password into a malicious function. Do you see the problem with this?
Then lock bash rc as read-only and root permission only, or disable aliasing altogether I guess
The script would place its own version of sudo in your
$PATHand wait for you to enter the password. Then it has it and can do what it likes with the information.Then it’d just tell you “wrong password” and forward you to the real sudo so that you can keep on working like nothing happened.
Edit: Or even better, pass your own commands to take over the whole system to the real sudo.
Disable aliasing I guess, or change to root owner, read only permission
Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.
I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)
On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.
I do have it on the side with some windows plug in right now.
Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.
Windows troubleshooting is always SFC and DISM as the new “have you tries turning it off and on again” default first recommended step lol.
One thing to keep in mind about the terminal:
In Linux, many GUI tools are simply pretty interfaces for the terminal. That’s why folks tell you that you’ll need the terminal occasionally, no matter what: you might need to type in commands that don’t already have a friendly GUI.
The terminal isn’t that scary, though! Every big distro has a support community. And if you need to do something in the terminal? Someone else has definitely needed to do the same thing, so you won’t need to figure it out on your own.
I mostly use Bazzite in front of a big TV. When I first set up the computer, I needed to use the terminal to configure a couple of things related to network shares. Later, I used it to help specific devices wake up the computer from sleep. It’s been months since then, and I’m not sure I’ve needed the terminal for anything else.
Use it as an opportunity to learn how your computer works. It’s really satisfying to understand how things happen.
I’d like to know a bit more about your troubles to answer.
Do you know what desktop you were using? If so, what did you like and what didnt you like?
Where were you reentering your password all the time? Was it logging in, logging in after the screen went dark, the wallet, etc?
What sort of troubleshooting were you doing? Was it an application not working, a piece of hardware, or something else?
The reason I’m asking these questions is because most people are interacting with just the desktop GUI, so some of your issues (password) may just be configuration, the distribution won’t matter. If your troubleshooting was due to hardware, there may be a better choice.
For example, I use Debian everywhere. That said, there are times where certain pieces of software or certain pieces of hardware work better with a different distribution. On my T480, I’m using arch, mostly because of the fingerprint reader and a some things I’m building will be easier this way.
Generically speaking, it doesnt matter which distribution you use, you can do the basics on all of them. What it can come down to is familiarity, hardware, and purpose, and the guiding principles for each distribution.
You should check Mint again, things in the Linux world are improving fast lately. Some people got their grampas into Linux and they are happy using it, with your use case it can easily also be the case, the terminal it’s not needed, may be sporadically and to setup some things as you like at first, like changing settings to not enter passwords, may be it’s not so safe but it’s not as unsafe as using Windows. Just get used to the good habit of making regular backups. In any case just make a post asking and we will be happy to help. Just go ahead and slowly you will get confidence to do more difficult things. The freedom that you experience using Linux really worth it, but it can take time to appreciate.
Any one of the uBlue projects is perfect for this use case.
KDE: https://getaurora.dev/
Gnome: https://projectbluefin.io/
Gaming: https://bazzite.gg/Install and setup once, run forever. Immutable so impossible to break for a non-tech user, no package upgrades fuck-ups because updates are atomic and don’t touch the currently running system, are done in the background and are completely invisible for the user, great hardware support, based on Fedora. Regular users can only install Flatpaks through the App Store.
The only “maintenance” needed is a weekly reboot to move to the latest OS image.
As a personal feedback, I moved my gadget enthusiast but tech illiterate father on Bluefin. He can ruin a Mac in less than a few months. He can generate undocumented bugs on iOS by his mere presence. He hasn’t touched the terminal in his life. But somehow, Bluefin is still running perfectly after a year and a half. That’s how robust it is.
As a side note, passwords are extremely useful for basic security, and a password less life is extremely dangerous. The fact that you need to input a password tells you that you’re doing something that requires extra care and attention.
If you’re lucky to have a fingerprint reader that supports Linux (extremely rare unfortunately), you can get away with typing your password once at login and using your fingerprint for everything else.
- Linux is intentionally made to be modular and using the terminal is pretty much the only standard way to do things across many distributions.
I highly suggest you stop avoiding it because it will most likely be faster and easier to do something (i.e. system-level changes) with it than not.
- If you want a hard-to-fuck-up distro, I think Atomic (at least that’s what Fedora calls them) distros are the best.
Similar to smartphones or MacOS, entire OS is a singular image that is also updated all at once. Core parts of the filesystem is also read-only, meaning it is pretty much impossible to mess things up if you don’t mean to do so deliberately.
The best in this regard are from uBlue project: Bazzite (most popular), Bluefin, Aurora, etc. While Bazzite is intended for gaming (things like Steam are pre-installed), the other are for general use. Bluefin uses GNOME desktop, while Aurora has KDE Plasma desktop environment. Look up their visuals and choose whichever one you like. I prefer Aurora because KDE Plasma is often much more familiar to Windows users.
- uBlue distros don’t require a password for system updates (they happen automatically in the background) and so do installing/updating programs.
