What is the best opinionated, minimal, happy-path-only, official-feeling landing page for Linux? A quick search right now didn't bring up anything I could endorse to a normie.
I have installed various flavors of Linux on various laptops over the years, and 100% of the time there were tough-to-diagnose issues with hardware components. With one laptop, the brightness level could not be changed. With another, installing Linux caused the battery to drain three times as fast and hibernation didn’t work properly. With another, I accidentally played music so loud that the speakers broke.
These are all things that I was able to figure out using my Google skills and general knowledge of Linux, but it is not an experience I’d recommend for a “regular person.”
I did specifically buy it around peripherals that I knew were officially Linux supported, but the install on it was extremely painless. That laptop was a piece of shit that literally started disintegrating, but Linux was certainly not to blame there.
I do wish Linux distros had some kind of "guaranteed hardware" support, where if you buy exactly the right components, it'll be a totally seamless experience
Frame.work: https://frame.work/
Dell: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000138246/linux-on-...
System76: https://system76.com/laptops
Kubuntu Focus: https://kfocus.org/land/business
I am sure there are more, this is only what I have found in less than 5 minutes of searching.
2. Dell supports an Ubuntu that was released in March 2023.
3. "on my Lemur Pro 10, the touchpad didn't work on Linux Mint out of the box."
4. Works perfectly on "Kubuntu," which... is great! Vertical integration!
Not disagreeing, but I think one of the major defining factors behind this is that most OEMs specifically design their hardware and drivers to work with Windows first. If they did the same for Linux instead, suddenly Linux would start to work with everything. Because having each individual piece of hardware support Linux has a much higher success rate than hoping an incomplete sweep over the available hardware by Linux will have covered everything that makes up a particular machine
i used linux on high end dell and msi laptopx not problem with battery.
linux really works way better now it did 6+ years ago, erased my trauma all my 4 attemps for years to use it.
The front page is a soup of meaningless babble. The installation guide is in programmers documentation style and split over 15 pages.
Literally the same amount of effort and level of complexity as installing Windows.
I understand as a software person it's hard to have a generous perspective when trying to distinguish between "confusing only for the hopelessly computer illiterate" and "potentially confusing for regular computer users", but we should try to err toward giving people the benefit of the doubt.
If that's incomprehensible to someone, then they're probably not going to be installing any operating system by themselves, Linux, Windows, or otherwise.
ChromeOS Flex might fit the bill though, and the installation process is probably the most straightforward and handhold-y out of the Linuxes. https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/en_uk/os/chromeosflex/
For a lot of home users, a "the browser is the new OS." If they're doing everything with cloud apps, then they really don't need to interact with a conventional desktop very much. Assuming they don't run Windows software such as games.
Battery life is no different than it was with Windows.
Linux mode was easy to set up, and hard for me to damage. ;-) And it doesn't seem to do anything to the Chrome OS machine, so you can wipe it and start over without re-installing the entire machine. Jupyter Notebook runs just fine, so I'm pretty much all set. Jupyter is practically my OS these days.
It seems targetted towards users in the right kind of way: https://kubuntu.org/feature-tour/
But to answer, my go to is either xubuntu or lubuntu for windows users, and kubuntu or mint for everyone else. Xubuntu first and lubuntu if for some reason Xubuntu wants to play stupid games (such as on elitedesks). There is some personal preference as to what makes a good "landing page", i think xubuntu's is a little better but they're both good (x and l ubuntus). Compare that to windows.com landing page, to contrast.
But your average windows user isn't googling "which linux should i get" because generally they've never heard of or do not understand what "linux" is. they're googling "how do i fix windows" - and getting back "how to fix drafty windows" from a search engine powered by linux. It takes evangelizing, and sometimes straight chaotic good "i'll fix your PC" and installing linux on it. There goes 99.5% of all "normal" user problems!
I've been using the *nix and linux since the mid 90s, and i still don't recommend anyone try it unless they're willing to sit on their PC and learn things. Sorry, not sorry. For the facebook/gmail/cnn/twitter browsers of the world, the three i listed above are just fine.
edited to add: it's a pity that WUBI is no more (last i knew, at least) - that would be how i would evangelize it for people that had mostly empty windows machines just for browsing the web and maybe some cute games (samegame for instance).