So i was surprised today when my fiancee told me she was thinking about switching over to linux. Surprised because she is absolutely not technically minded, but also because she was weary about having Microsoft AI slop forced on her PC every update. ( i’m so proud!)
Now i’ve used a little linux but i’ve always been a holdout. Won’t stop me from moving someone else over but i have too much going on in my setup to deal with that right now. So i’m not super versed but i was able to give her the basic rundown of what distros are, concerns when switching, what may and may not be available, shes still on board so we’re doing this! Knowing her she would like to not have to transition too much, whats something fairly hands off and easy to learn. I’ve heard some good things about mint from hanging around you nerds the past few years but also some not so good things, any suggestions?
next concern is what kind of transfer process is this going to be? i have some spare HDD’s so we can try and get everything ported over but i’m so busy with school right now i can’t quite allocate the time to really deep dive this.
Any help is appreciated, cheers!
A lot of folks recommending Mint Cinnamon. I agree, that’s a great choice, one of my favorites. If for some reason there are technical problems, you might also try something with KDE, like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE. Also windows-like, even more mainstream than Cinnamon, faster to adopt new shit like Wayland.
Unfortunately, Linux Mint devs are transphobic.
I’m also fascinated by this I’ve literally never heard it before and I’m here for the tea / popcorn. 🍿
Linux Mint is the windows 7 experience of linux. It gets out of the way so you can work. It also has the best in-OS help tools. It’s also a bit more conservative in terms of newest features, so it’s a lot more reliable.
If she does PC gaming, you might want to look at Bazzite rather than Mint. It’s a lot better equipped for non-technical people to start gaming. It’s basically a preconfigured Fedora linux, so it’s got a solid foundation. It’s also something called an immutable distro, which basically means it’s more difficult to break as the core OS is “read only” (to simplify).
In terms of migrating, best to avoid dual booting off a single disk. Microsoft keeps breaking Linux installs (probably on purpose). So best to install a second SSD.
Before you migrate, have her make a list of software she uses and the hardware she has. Best to post that on a forum like this to have more experienced people look for possible issues.
When it gets to migration day, if bitlocker is disabled, you can access your windows data from linux.
Also get her on Lemmy and asking questions directly. The best thing you can teach a low tech person is how to get help.
Don’t forget to grab protonup-qt so you can easily install proton GE which has better .net support so more games work.
Thx for the tip, will give it a try.
I got it from the protonup app that is pre installed.
Thx for the tip. I just got a 5x FPS boost in a very poorly optimized sim game “war at sea” thing was chugging along at 5-6 fps when lots of ships were on the screen. Was maxing out all 32 threads on my 5950x. Now it’s running a cool 20% utilization.
Unfortunately, Linux Mint devs are transphobic.
I have the deepest respect for my trans siblings - after all, the very first woman and humanity’s saviour were both trans. However, I googled “Linux mint transphobia” and couldn’t find what you’re talking about. I’d like to take your accusation seriously, so could you provide a source, or if that’s not possible, your story?
I too am fascinated by this assertion.
Bazzite is atomic, not immutable
Its both
It uses an atomic update system on an immutable base. They don’t refer to the same thing, but you sort of need the one when you use the other for it to make sense.
Here are some tips once you have chosen:
You can change your desktop environment later.
If you do your install with seperate partitions for /home and others, leave 10% unallocated. Also make /bin about 15gb and /boot about 1.5gb. When you eventually run out of space, you can use KDE Partition manager to add the unallocated space to the partition you need, even if you set up encryption (gparted doesn’t play well with encryption). You can install Partition manager as a package, you don’t need to use KDE Plasma.
Using a drive mirror is a good idea. Maybe use it the second time you install.
If you want to use a cool filesys like zfs, just use btrfs for now (licensing issues). Ext4 will also work for desktop user needs.
If you go with Debian, you can add repos to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. But it is a one-way trip, so before adding sid, consider running your program in a vm. Non-free non-free-firmware and contrib are fine
Gentoo
LFS
If it’s her first, I think Ubuntu is a great place to start
It was in 2005, these days people tend to recommend Mint to the beginners.
Install gentoo
What, no LFS?
Show her some pictures or videos of DEs and see what she likes. If she’s someone who likes to make it look the way she wants, she might get a bit more out of KDE than Cinnamon for example.
There are two “just works” distros I recommend to new users: Bazzite or Fedora.
Start with Bazzite. It is familiar and has lots of guardrails so it’s nearly impossible to break.
If you decide you want more control over your system later, switch to Fedora KDE.
If you decide you want even more control and flexibility, consider CachyOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
You will see Mint recommended a lot, but I don’t like it. The default desktop — Cinnamon — is very Windows 95, and I much prefer KDE Plasma, which doesn’t work well on Mint. Mint also has driver issues with newer hardware. But if you like retro and your hardware is older, give it a try.
Avoid Pop_OS right now. It’ll probably be amazing in a year, but the new Cosmic desktop (currently a beta) has a lot of annoying bugs with common linux GUI packages.
Bazzite, i tried arch and then realized the whole wiki was like a uni level symposium and was burning through steps, kept doing instead of understanding, etc…
It’s probably amazing, but since my only interaction with linux back then was being forced to use it at uni and windows, I really wanted a good experience of what linux could be. I needed it to work out of the box and be unbreakable, so I went with bazzite.
It’s great, and I am digging the immutable aspect even if it broke my brain for any dev work, but once you learn how to use an immutable system (still figuring it out tbh) it’s solid, easy, and works great.
Really wished there was more resources on immutable systems for newcomers though XD
What’s the adjustment like with immutable systems?
Its not particularly crazy, most things can be installed via flathub. If something isnt there, install it through distrobox (you can install things through the AUR, packages like rpm and deb, etc). And if that doesn’t work, install the app directly through rpm-ostree (only thing I did this with was a vpn app, you can point to a .rpm file for this). I use flathub for the vast majority of things, I think I only have two apps installed outside of it.
What’s great is nothing ever breaks this way. Ever. It all works. Broken upgrades haven’t happened to me after a year of using this, meanwhile I had plenty on debian and small distros like manjaro, mint, cachyos, nobara.
What are some examples of broken upgrades? I can’t really think of any of Kubuntu, except that the recent major distro update broke my fan’s RGB and they run proprietary Windows-only control programs so I can’t fix it.
Mmm sometimes if you don’t update for a long time you can’t really update at all without following specific instructions. Nobara for instance had a major breakage between 41 and 42 versions that required you to debug from a boot drive iirc. One of my friends just had debian break on their not very used laptop and it can’t upgrade. Bazzite will not have these issues, image based upgrades solve the broken upgrade and config drift problems. And if for some reason it does break, it’s always solved by a one line rpm-ostree rebase command. Whereas with other distros the process to fix it is very involved usually
Ah ok. So far, upgrades on Linux seem quite messy in my experience. I still don’t fully get why libraries need to pull 1-2 GB of updates every other day, for instance. I don’t mind keeping up with bleeding edge distros, but the data usage can get irksome.
I think you will eventually get tired of all the workarounds needed for immutable systems. Its a nice idea but full of pain when actually wanting to use the computer to do actual work.
But its ok! Everyone tries different things in the Linux world and we all just enjoy the ride.
Coming up on 10 years since I switched from windows to Linux. I tried Ubuntu and absolutely hated it, so much so that I switched back to windows at first. But I kept reading and tried ZorinOS, and that got me comfortable with Linux, it was a little buggy but I could understand it.
After a few months with ZorinOS I switched to Linux Mint and have been running Mint for 9 years. Recently my 76 year old mother who has trouble with some basic computer stuff said she’d like to try Linux and asked me to help her, I made a live USB of Mint for her to try and she told me “I can understand this, it’s like windows 7!”. If she can get Mint, I feel totally confident recommending it to new users.
Yeah I think mint sits in a sweet spot there for people who want that window 7 experience.
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Nice username, lol.
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Agreed, I wasn’t even looking for the Win 7 experience, I was just still getting the hang of Linux and Mint was repeatedly recommended everywhere I looked. At this point I’m just comfortable with Mint and so I stick with it, and since I value reliability of cutting edge, it gives me what I need in a computer.
Yup and it will never slow down with time or start to annoy you with ads or tracking like every windows version in existance.
If the general public understood how they should spend a few days learning a basic Linux distro… That would be great.
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Everyone hypes Mint but if you’re working with newish hardware you might have a bad time due to the drivers taking a while to mature and filter down through all the distros. If her rig is a couple years old it should work just fine though. I would also suggest trying out Kubuntu, Pop!_OS, PikaOS, and Zorin if that is the case.
If she is on brand new hardware then something Arch based is the way to go IMO. CachyOS, Garuda, and EndeavorOS are all Arch based distros that make setup easy and they’ve all worked great for me out of the box. Honestly if you have snapshots configured with timeshift or something being on a rolling distro isn’t as scary as it’s made out to be. Fedora is an option too as they get updates every 6 months, but there is a little extra setup to do after install like media codecs and proprietary drivers etc.
Cachyos was my personal pick and it’s working perfect for me so far.
Did this with my SO, they have mint like me. And they like it!
They wanted puppy linux though xD
So my standard thing with newbies is to suggest putting it on their old machine rather than dual booting. I feel most people will be amazed at how fast linux runs on their last pc and how slowly windows does on their current and if they dual boot it can lead to lazily keeping it booted in windows were as if the linux is available for web browsing and such it will help getting used to it. What I use I think is good for newbies. Its a lazy mans linux in the sense that it comes with everything you need out of the box. Its called zorin and its an ubuntu lts respin and once installed without doing any further tinkering you can rdp to a windows host, burn a disk, open and edit sound, image, and video files. along with standard web browser and libre office and such. I think most folks could go with it unmodified for most everything they need to do. Since its ubuntu you can add programs from the software program and update with the update program but if you feel the need to do like windows many downloads will have a debian linux option which when double clicked will work fine. also out of the box it has wine with play on linux installed so often times windows programs can be run by right clicking them and telling it to run with wine.
