On Mint, it’s rare and only when I try and do something that isn’t already packed up as an app. I might go weeks without using it, then use it all day for a few days.

I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.

I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.

I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.

I rarely touch my terminal and do so only because I am already familiar with it. I should use it more. I don’t think its any more necessary to use the terminal in linux than it is in windows for a computer user. I consider zorin the most user friendly and mainly because its out of the box (when its installed it has software already on that fits for most things people want to do with a computer.)

Just as much as you can use Windows without the command line/powershell.

The vast majority of tasks do not require it but some will and some tasks will be easier via the terminal if you take the time to read 2-3 pages of documentation.

Don’t be scared of the terminal

Yes, or… i dont know

But seems like most UIs like kde and cinnamon do a good job of making everything part of the Ui, so you ahouldnt have to

I still use the terminal. I dont know most commands but AI can often help, with a proper explanation (and remember to tell it which distro youre using etc. bonus points if you know if you use grub or systemd.

ChromeOS and Android both prove that you CAN provide an experience sans terminal.

I think anything with flatpaks or snap store will be in a pretty good spot

I would stay that for 95% of usual tasks I don’t use terminal on Linux Mint Debian Faye 6 (LMDE), most of the software can be installed by double clicking a .deb file you download from the web. Compared to 10 years ago when I tried Linux for the first time (and reverted to Win back then) nowadys it is insanely more convenient to use.

Hell you can use Arch without the terminal if you really wanted to. CachyOS for example uses Octopi which is one of the few Arch Package Manager GUI’s that support both Pacman and AUR. so in that case you may never really need to touch the terminal and Octopi is preinstalled with CachyOS.

Other than that Fedora KDE or Bazzite are good options. But yeah there are few Distros where you really don’t need to use the Terminal if you don’t want to.

All the “software stores” I have seen: ubuntu’s software center, flatpack are utter trash. Offensively bad. I’m not sure how you can even get the flatpack store without the terminal.

so, e.g. flatpak tells you to install flatpak via commandline on ubuntu. Apparently it’s built into linux mint.

https://flathub.org/en/setup/Ubuntu

but when trying to install a random app,

https://flathub.org/en/apps/app.curocalc.calculator/install

the instructions are to “download file and execute”, but my filebrowser doesn’t have a “execute this file” option in my right click and double clicking does… nothing? Certainly doesn’t give me a popup with either confirmation or error message.

I’m game to try a few more things, so if you have suggestions what I should try, please tell me.

I’m on xubuntu.

I use Bazzite on my main battlestation and have only really “needed” to use the terminal once (in about a year). It’s definitely what I would recommend for people just switching from Windows, even if they don’t game.

I use cli just for making virtual mics and audio sinks and for .jar, so things people who are afraid of cli probably wouldn’t even consider doing. Currently using bazzite. The immutable nature make it annoying when you want to do some things via cli that don’t work like they would in vanilla fedora, but that doesn’t seem like it would be a problem for someone who doesn’t want to use cli. Bazzite includes bazaar for accessing flatpaks and works fine usually.

GUI and shortcuts change everything

CLI rarely does and the only change is the name of a command

I’m same as you (7 years though), but I have Fedora as a family computer. I mostly like it. I used Fedora for a year almost exclusively a couple of years back, and I quite enjoy the experience as a macOS refugee. Tried Silverblue (immutable distro), it looks even better for an average folk, but I haven’t used it for a long time to comment on that.

Recently, a Fedora installation broke on me (bad kernel upgrade), and was so for a month, spanning 4 kernel upgrades. I had to manually boot into a working kernel (F8 during boot in grub), and remove the new kernel. I avoided updates till there was a newer kernel version, tried again, to no success. It took them a month to fix the regression, now it’s good back. The kernel versions were since 6.17.10 till 6.18.4, and time frame was since December 14th till January 12th this year. It was relatively trivial to troubleshot (I used ChatGPT for assistance, but I was knowledgeable of what I was doing).

I have no idea what would a regular new user do. I have no idea how a Silverblue version would handle this situation, I have a regular Fedora Workstation installed.

However, apart from that, I have been running Fedora without any issues for years. One computer runs about 5 years now. The other served me for a couple of years, now it’s Arch Linux server, but it had no issues at all.

I guess I’d avoid Ubuntu. I might have tried Bazzite (if for gaming) or Pop_OS! (for their Cosmic Desktop thing). I have no other distros in mind. I don’t like Debian, especially for a desktop, it’s too old, and running testing… well, I’d rather run Arch then.

Fedora has RPM Fusion, which is kind of AUR, so distros based on it should theoretically have it too. But I don’t have any first-hand experience with that.

Yes. There are distros such as LinuxMint Cinnamon Edition that allow doing everything from the GUI.

The issue is when searching for answers most will provide a solution using the terminal, even when it is doable using the GUI.

Generally you can use use the GUI with things like Nobara Linux.

But most software install instructions are all “copy and paste these commands”.