Pardon my ignorance, fellow Linux user. I just happened to mention the ones I heard of.

Will check these out and include them.

It could be simplified with an overview at the beginning.

I should maybe have done the overview.

Format USB, burn iso, boot to usb, test, repeat if necessary

Exactly why Ventoy was suggested. To avoid repeating the formatting and burning ISO over and over again.

If they have already made the decision, no reason to list replacement programs

Oh, I see what you mean. I should have asked to skip to Step 2 after 1-A. Edited it now. Thanks.

you might get some better results if you dropped it into AI and asked for a summary.

Yeah, no, a lot of people don’t like slop.

You’re writing a guide how to switch to GNU/Linux. If you want to discuss browsers, do it in another guide. If someone wants to switch operating systems, confusing them with browser choices isn’t helping.

Switch from what? Are we talking about MacOS or OpenBSD? Did I say switch from Safari?

Of course, some people who switch from Windows are going to consider if they want to move away from Windows based apps. And M$ Edge being Windows’ native browser is one of them. I’ve seen some teachers/professors who just use the browsers that is there by default.

You seem to be vehemently butthurt over the fact that I just didn’t leave it at the native Firefox/Chromium that a distro might provide. And I already explained my reasoning and I’ve in fact suggested a more privacy-focused alternative. If I suggested something like Brave that has a history of silently injecting affiliate links and is bloated with crypto, you’d have every right to be angry.

I’ve installed Librewolf on some really old, non-technical people’s systems and they’ve not complained. Not one bit. Until I hear someone complain about this affecting their usage, I’m going to keep suggesting it.
And yes, I should have included the bit about enabling cookies so their accounts don’t get logged out.

You’re also saying the guide is for people who recently got interested in switching to Linux. Those people don’t need to hear about Arch.

Yes, recently because of the end of support and enhanced enshittification of Windows. Why would I want to decide who’s going to be reading this? Anyone ranging from having maximum patience to minimum patience could be reading it. And I clearly mentioned that fact about Arch requiring enough time and patience. If I just said, “Hey, just get on with Arch”, you’ve every reason to be concerned about. You just have your own set of people in mind to target. I’m just informing everything. People with decent reading comprehension will understand the implications of what I’ve advised.

A comprehensive guide for that target audience should focus on comprehensively describing one or two distributions targeted at that target audience.

To quote from ‘Big Lebowski’, “That’s just like your opinion, man.”

Someone who just started looking into switching to Linux is looking for neither X11 nor Wayland support.

Someone already rebutted you on this on how people will get frustrated with their installation if they didn’t know that HDR/VRR don’t get supported on X11. And I’ve also been talking about gaming. So, yeah. A lot of them care about GSync/FreeSync and 10-bit colour.

Describe Mint in detail, especially pointing out differences they can face between Mint and Windows, and mention that other distributions also exist if they want to try them in the future.

Fair enough point about pointing out the differences. Will try to make notes about that sometime.

I reckon converting would lead to more lost data than just using NTFS partition. This also locks users into using the drive under Linux. I just don’t think this is a useful recommendation for someone who is just switching from Windows.

More lost data? How so?

But yes, it does lock users using the drive under Linux. I’ve tried with some third party tools to access ext4 on Windows and it was really slow.

And I’ve already mentioned about exFAT if they still want to share files across OS along with its potential risk.

No. When someone wants to switch to GNU/Linux, don’t also shove your other opinions onto them. There’s nothing wrong with Firefox or Chromium, which often come preinstalled.

I said this was my experience and there is a reason why I started using/recommending these apps. A lot of people would just simply disagree with you claiming that Firefox or Chromium have nothing wrong. People already hate AI features being built into Firefox and don’t want google’s tentacles around their neck on chromium.

This whole section is way too long. Here’s what it should say: Use Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. Or if your entire focus is gaming, use Bazzite.

Again, this has been my experience. And the title does say ‘comprehensive’ guide. Not a quick guide.

No new user gives a fuck what Linux distribution is. They don’t care what atomic distribution is. And talking to them about Arch can only lead to disaster.

I’ve been asked in Bluesky about what a distro is by some people. And I had to explain it to them. So yeah, they do care.

No. Do not recommend unsupported distribution which doesn’t work with the most popular GPU brand to any new users.

And that is exactly what I meant. Are you sure you’re reading it correctly? I included it and explicitly did not recommend it so that people don’t get misled from posts online making them believe that SteamOS will bring about the Year of the Linux and so on.

This section unnecessary since the previous section should already direct the new user to either Mint or Bazzite.

Mint is great. Bazzite is great.

But not everyone will be looking for X11 support and therefore Mint. And wrt Bazzite, not everyone will want to use an atomic distro.

I see you want to simply stuff and just ask people to resort to one or two things. But that’s not going to stop people. They’re going to experiment different things. Hence the ‘comprehensive’ guide. People reading carefully and having good reading comprehension will already see that I mentioned Mint to be the most friendly and popular, and also explained in detail about how one can rollback from a failed state with Bazzite.

That would already point the users, who want things to just work, towards them.

There should be no ‘if’. A new user should not do manual partitioning. If they are interested in doing it, they’re already way too advanced to read your tutorial.

I asked people to ignore it if they don’t want it. And once again, this is a ‘comprehensive’ guide.

Uh? Why? Let them use NTFS if the drive is in NTFS

I’ve explained what goes wrong with it and I’ve also stated for people who dual boot that NTFS can get corrupt and how to resolve it. For those who are only on Linux, I’ve been told that running fsck(file system consistency check) on a corrupted NTFS drive may not go well. Hence the reason I asked them to convert it to ext4.

If I’m wrong on this, please do shed light. I’ll correct myself on this.

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I’ve used Mint before and I’ve little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.