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Comment by xracy | Hacker News Reader

Here's a question. Currently I hate Macs (for the expense), and Windows (for a number of reasons having to do with the OS).

But I have been questioning what the best flavor of linux to set up someone who has little to no "technology skills", on. Does anyone have a good recommendation?

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I've been choosing Xubuntu for the following reasons:

- It's based on Ubuntu

- It runs better on old machines than Unity or Genome Ubuntu "flavors"

- I can easily customize the TaskBar/Dock/"Start Menu" to feel like Windows or Mac OS depending where the user is migrating from.

I've seen some friends go with Manjaro or Mint, but I think they both end up raising more "support" questions than Xubuntu (I have no examples at mind now to substantiate why though)

PS: If the user is migrating from Win XP also consider Lubuntu

Xubuntu is my distro of choice, for those reasons. One cannot understate the usefulness of the Ubuntu base; it makes the whole ecosystem that much more useful and maintainable. I even use it on newer machines, just for the speed. I switched to Mint for a while, but when I tried Xubuntu again, they were using wisker-menu by default. So I mapped the windows key to it, so I could press it and start typing names of programs, just like Windows (a UI feature they nailed).

I'm a huge fan of elementary OS (https://elementary.io/).

It's based on Ubuntu, so you have all of the normal resources that come with one of the most popular distros, but I think elementary is much sleeker.

I wanted something that I wouldn't hate to look at, but didn't have to spend a lot of time configuring to get there. I definitely found that in elementary OS, and I've been a happy user for around 2 years now.

I'd say Ubuntu simply because of it's popularity, most of the problems have been fixed or can be simply googled and solution is usually in the first result.

Xubuntu is great even for people who have a lot of technology skills. I spend most of my time on macOS and Windows, but I do run a bunch of VMs and have a personal Linux laptop. I have been trying this and that, and always end up installing Xubuntu which just works.

Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu. Can't really go wrong with any of them. All have graphical installers that'll set you up with no drama, all support a wide variety of hardware, and they're the 'standard' distros that pretty much any and all software runs on.

This may be slightly unpopular, but Ubuntu's Unity interface is probably the easiest for a newbie. It has a big dock with big buttons, the search feature is accessible, and it has a relatively tame look. Gnome shell is my favourite, but things are hidden and windows are always flying around. KDE has too many options - too much opportunity for newbies to get confused or to mess something up and not know how to fix it.

>Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu. Can't really go wrong with any of them.

Yes. The experience will be the same: you'll have issues sooner or later, and someone on a forum will tell you, why didn't you use one of the other two, or some alternative distro.

There isn't that much difference. But I'd pick something in the top 2-3 most popular. That way (once you show them) they can easily google their problem and likely find a web page and a youtube video to show them.

I picked ubuntu LTS because it's popular, fairly straight forward, and supported for 5 years. Change can be confusing and it's nice to minimize it and have long enough so you can plan when to upgrade instead of having things randomly change every 6-9 months.

Set autologin, get rid of icons you don't need, and set them up a default homepage and some useful links. I recommend showing them a webmail instead of a mail client which tends to be more complex.

Go over basic safety (one password per site), never giving a credit card number out (or only to trusted sites over ssl). If there's a local LUG (linux user group) it might be worth mentioning.

If they want my help I enable remote ssh (with passwords disabled) and put my key on it. That way I can fix things, see their screen, etc.

Ubuntu is great for me. Easy to set up, didn't have to command line anything to set stuff up (not that I shy away from terminals at all) (you might have to touch a terminal during install if you have a device that Ubuntu doesn't include a driver for out of the box), it's got some cohesive design, and it works for software development and gaming for me.

There's some variants of it that are pretty popular (and use the same software repos but have different desktop environments installed and configured by default), though I half-jokingly wonder if at least some of the popularity of them are from people not wanting to be seen as just settling down on the "noob distro".

As I mentioned in my post, Mint (or the Cinnamon GUI in general) is very Win7-inspired and easy to teach to someone who's only used Windows in the past. I personally run Ubuntu LTS with Cinnamon on my own laptop (since I needed a newer kernel than Mint provides), before that I used standard Mint. Since it's Ubuntu underneath, it has the same amount of supported software.

I used to use Xubuntu, which is a cracking OS with a GUI comparable to Gnome 2, but I came to like the Cinnamon GUI more than XFCE.

Xubuntu - beautiful, clean and simple, and none of the bloat and weirdness of vanilla Ubuntu.

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