I don’t know of any that need some final push. I would think it would be better to just contribute to kde or gnome ui/ux wise. I would say my distro but I almost never click the scroll wheel and just tried it out and it does paste on middle click. No idea why that would be a deal breaker. Also have no idea what windows does on middle click even though its been the majority of what I used day to up until a year or so ago or for the mac even though I used it in the late aughts.

Linux Mint is often recommended to users coming from Windows, so… Kubuntu, Pop!OS and OpenSuSE are maybe also decent for that use case.

What is the LTT Linux test? I know its a reference to the LTT YouTube channel and the fail they experienced. But how do we a LTT Linux test and report it as a success?

it really depends on what demands you are going to place upon the system…

gaming? have weird hardware? you’re gonna visit a command line and have to ‘research’ things…

but just basic tasks and well-supported hardware? many can give a mostly or even entirely ‘point and click’ experience.

i have a number of users on silverblue and endless that would be terrified if they ever had to open a terminal, and i rarely open a terminal on my own desktops (xfce manjaro, cinnamint, endless, silverblue)

Linux Mint

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has a GUI for almost everything. It has a nice GUI for basic system config, and uses YaST2 for deeper settings, and it uses Discover for Flatpaks as well as system library updates.

Although, I have seen a couple people say Discover shouldn’t be used for doing system updates because it can fail, and to only use it for Flatpak updates and installs. I dunno. But it’s not like typing sudo zypper dup to do a distro upgrade is hard, so I just do that out of an abundance of caution.

OpenSUSE has some other cool features too, like having Snapper installed by default for system snapshots. It’s pretty easy to roll back if an upgrade goes sideways. There’s a boot entry that lets you open a previous snapshot as read-only and then you can make that snapshot permanent by creating a new top-level snapshot from it. So then you can at least use your computer while you try to figure out why the upgrade you did failed.

You’ll probably want to use KDE as your desktop environment. It’ll be somewhat familiar if you’re use to Windows, and it has a lot of features that make it comfortable to use.

There are lots of good YouTube videos on why OpenSUSE is pretty cool. Check some out.

lol, sorry but in what world do you live in? NONE of the OS “just works”.

I’m sorry but this is such a trope. I watched someone using an up to date iOS phone. That thing is LOCKED down to no end, countless people claim that Apple are some kind of UX geniuses … well you look somebody trying to do anything as complex as watching a video on this and it’s a damn struggle.

Sorry for going on a rant here but the very concept is a lie. It’s like Windows being easier to use, it’s absolutely not BUT people have trained, at school (sigh) or at work, on how to use it. They somehow “forget” that they went through hours or even days of training and somehow they believe it feels “natural”. That’s entirely dishonest but why do I insist on this so much? Because it’s unfair to then compare Linux distributions to things that do not exist!

What “just works” but STILL is not perfect or flawless, is SteamOS on the SteamDeck not due to any “magic” from Valve but rather because :

• the hardware is very limited (basically selected to work well for it)
• the use case is very limited (start Steam, play)

and as soon as one start to tinker with SteamOS on SteamDeck by replacing part, adding USB-C devices, remote the r/w restriction on the OS, etc then again “just works” becomes “worked at some point”.

Is MacOs “absolutely no cli”? It wasn’t when I was using it (admittedly, some 10yrs ago), except for the basic things (which any mainstream linux distro also provides).

What about Windows? Back in the day I would have paid to have a semi-decent CLI instead of being forced to use regedit (I hear regedit is still going strong, but I’ve not touched windows for an even longer period than MacOs)

Linux Mint comes closest ime, but it really depends what you want to do. You should ask yourself this question: am I a power user? If the answer is ‘no’, and you just need to do basic media/productivity stuff, you’re going to have a frictionless experience with most popular Linux distros. If the answer is ‘yes, but I don’t want to learn another operating system’ then you should stick with what you know.

you’ll become comfortable with the cli, it’s seriously not hard.

all you need to know to start is:

• ls (list files)
• cd (change directory)
• nano (edit text file)

then you can branch out from there

Sounds like you are asking for an iPad or a locked down Android pad. The commercial pad offerings to the non-technical public are GUI only, they spend a huge amount of man hours to create the UX. Even if the Linux desktops are getting better every year, you are accepting a limited experience without the terminal.

What kind of contributing?

If you mean actually adding code or packaging or testing or anything along those lines, you’re probably looking for gnome. They hate normal linux stuff like middle click paste.

If you mean contributing by using linux, just pick something and start. You’ll have a lot to learn no matter what so there’s no point wasting time trying to figure out what you’re gonna want and working towards that.

If you mean putting other people on linux, don’t do that. It will make them unhappy and cause you lots of stress and work. Find a way to keep them on the systems they’re familiar with, either by using the well documented windows 10 iot ltsc or the accessibility options in macos. People deserve to choose weather or not they switch operating systems and when those decisions are made for them it needs to be done by those who will be working with them every day.

It would be helpful if your example of behaving identical to macos or windows were more clear, since macos and windows behave wildly different from each other. It’s like saying you need a normal european car that works just like your 2500 Silverado or civic si.

I see that as full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac (is no middle click to paste).

Linux is not Windows. Stop trying to make it work like Windows. Windows is crap and I don’t want Linux to work like it.

Expecting Linux to work like Windows is how new people get frustrated. Have you heard anyone say that macOS needs to be like Windows to succeed? Of course not. So stop saying that about Linux.

Also, “no middle-click to paste” is astonishingly stupid, I’ve been using it hundreds of times per day for way over a decade now. It’s one of the most useful and helpful features I’ve ever used.

I haven’t kept up with that clown but if that’s a reference to the time he attempted to switch, that was a top-gear-like slapstick show, consisting of making wrong turns at every fork and having outliers galore in the form of some hardware he and one other dude on the entire planet got. that show of his is infotainment, as in not a reliable source of information.

you go with the beginner-friendliest distro, with the widest distribution which is ubuntu. that ain’t the distro I’m running, but it’s something you need to go through to figure out how this shit runs. after you’ve been around the block a time or two and you start bumping your head at the ceiling, you’ll have enough experience to switch to something better.