My head tells me Linux Mint, but my heart says listen to your head. Why is this hard? 😂
Mint
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.
Basic Debian
Yes, it is a bit behind the curve but it is solid, it works and can provide a solid environment for the average run of the mill user.
Something immutable and auto updating, likely Fedora based because that’s what I use.
I installed Aurora cause immutable and auto update so hard to break anything. And normal user only need Browser, LibreOffice and maybe Thunderbird
Arch, no gui. Let 'em rawdog it from the CLI
Linux from scratch you mean?
Gentoo FTW. Just give them a bootable USB key.
Pfff, when I was young we didn’t have package managers. You have it too good.
Back in my day we programmed with punch cards!
CachyOS with KDE, it works well rounded and has easy to use apps to maid arch super easy and if you need help there’s a convenient discord server filled with helpers, it’s well documented, and we use it so if they need help it would be easier to guide them through things. Heavy recommend. Plus if they don’t like pacman they can always get the flatpak store
I love cachyos with KDE! Not sure if I’d recommend it to a complete noob, but if they’re familiar enough with computers in general, then go for it!
HML if it’s for someone else.
HML
Hold My Lard?
Hannah Montana Linux
Mint, without question. A polished, conservative, stable experience with Ubuntu’s broad compatibility baked in, and a familiar desktop experience. Few other distributions can deliver that. I’m very technical myself, but past the age of wanting to tinker with every little thing; I jist want an OS that is stable and gets out of my way to let me get things done - and Mint delivers.
Whatever you are comfortable with supporting.
Fedora Silverblue
Linux Mint Debian Edición if the laptop is not brand new.
I would definitely choose Linux Mint 100% :p
I started off with it and its learning curve wasn’t too steep. It uses Calamares for installation, features a built-in app store, and is very familiar to those coming from Windows.
Fedora. That’s what I run on my laptop and it’s great.
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.
