I’m trying to set up a Linux laptop for a friend who lives in another city. They have only ever used Windows, and likely won’t have easy access to fix issues (not that I’m an expert).

First off, is it a good idea to give them a Linux PC at all? Have others had good/bad experiences giving technophobes Linux?

Secondly, if I go ahead with it, what’s a good, stable, “safe” OS for a beginner? I’m shy of anything that’s a rolling release (e.g. Arch, Manjaro etc) as “bleeding edge” can break things more often than not. I’m leaning towards Debian or something Debian based. But I’ve also heard good things about Fedora.

If I was the one using the PC, I’d have installed Fedora, as I’ve heard it’s well-maintained. Then again there’s been some good buzz about Debian 12. What would your advice be? Thanks!

  • coldredlight@beehaw.org
    4·
    2 years ago

    I run Pop on my laptop and have been really happy with it. I’m not really a Linux person and it’s been totally straight forward for me, it seems very user friendly.

    • piezoelectronOP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Perfect! Honestly, my greatest fear is that something breaks and they need to look up fixes by themselves. For a technophobe, StackOverflow and other forums can be pretty intimidating or downright hostile.

      Ideally I’d like to opt for a distro that firstly works well on old machines (I’m going for a ThinkPad T400, i.e. an ancient one), and secondly, if it does break, can be fixed with a GUI hopefully.

      • Eric Lyman@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Years and years ago, I used Mint on an underpowered notebook and it worked well, but Mint kind of got bloated and I wasn’t a huge fan of it at the end.

        I played around with a couple of other distros that I can’t remember at the moment on other older PCs. I think I just googled ‘good linux distro for old pcs’ and (whatever) they were did the trick for my kids.