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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

> I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s.

What would you recommend as a modern-day user-friendly Linux experience? I've been looking for something not too demanding to put on an old X220.

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To techies who are interested in using Linux, I personally recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it has up-to-date packages and is relatively stable. Debian Stable is a good choice if you're insensitive to outdated packages. Debian Sid is alright, but in my experience has more breakage than Tumbleweed and recovery from that breakage requires more expertise (Tumbleweed automatically creates btrfs snapshots before and after every package manager action, making it easy to roll back any mistakes or bad upgrades.)

To the average Joe Blow, I don't recommend any Linux distro. I only give recommendations about Linux to people who already want to use Linux for their own reasons; I don't evangelize it to people who are already content with Windows or Macs. For such people, Windows or Macs are a better choice.

> To the average Joe Blow, I don't recommend any Linux distro.

Windows + WSL is pretty neat and very close to be the best of two worlds.

The average Joe, friend of mine, doing mostly SEO stuff (so has some basic web background) was able to start using WSL to run his curl tests, running some tools like sitespeed.io in his docker and things of that sort, without leaving his lovely Windows system.

So I'm pretty assured here.

Linux mint is brain dead simple. Everything just works. Same version runs on a 14 year old laptop as well as it does on a newer Epyc deskside workstation. There are others like it, but Mint is really quite simple to use, and quite a productive environment.

There are others like it as well.

I've been running linux on my desktops/laptops and servers for the past 24 years. I've not run into problems from a desktop/laptop perspective for the last 15 years. Some have, but its rare.

Fedora. If you don't like Gnome, the Fedora KDE spin is almost as polished

MX-Linux, hands down. The most user friendly desktop distro I've used.

Agreeing with others, Fedora, partifularly the KDE spin if you want somethings a little Windows GUI like.

Honestly you should take a stab at arch. There is a cli wizard installer now.

Arch was what I first tried, probably about a decade ago (on the same hardware). I had some networking troubles, the details of which I don't recall, and probably some other failures of understanding on my part.

Totally agree that was your experience. The benefit now is there is a “do you want to install systemd network manager” step which if you say yes will significantly ease your setup. My family and friends I buy used thinkpads and install arch with a windows vm and honestly nobody blinks an eye. 99% of what people do is a web browser so just throw chrome/chromium on there and make sure KDE is setup to bug a bit for updates and yer fine. I won’t go back to giving windows laptops out.

Not sure about performance on an X220, but I've loved Fedora workstation edition. The default Gnome setup is pretty user-friendly in my opinion, a there's a decent amount of support to be found online.

I'm not certain, but "needing a bash script to change the mouse scroll speed" sounds like the kind of inanity I've come to expect from Gnome. KDE is probably a better choice for somebody with this complaint.

It might also be a Wayland and/or libinput limitation.

I have used fedora on my x220 since I bought it new. Still runs perfectly.

HN would throttle my posting if I replied to everyone, so I'll just pick this comment, which speaks most directly to my experience, and thank everyone while thanking you. Do you remember if there were any tweaks you needed at the beginning, especially to get all the hardware working?

Open suse leap or tumbleweed for work, depending on your situation. For home use something like mint. I dont do banking on my computer or money stuff. For that I use my Iphone

Mint or manjaro

I agree with Linux Mint but you can just download and boot off a thumb drive to try it out yourself without actually installing anything.

I would try Mint with KDE but also try a few other desktops. Maybe you will like them more.

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