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Comment by sroerick | Hacker News Reader

I have not tried Zorin, but it is near the top of distros I would give to a "set it and forget it" non-techie.

Anybody have a top 5 list for distros in this realm? I'm an Artix / OpenBSD guy these days and I feel like I'm too far down the rabbit hole to know what's good for new folks.

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Debian. I’m not trolling, it’s easy to install, very stable, and KDE, while allowing everything to be customized, is awesome out of the box. It’s way more oldschool than what I’m seeing of Zorin there but for the oldschoolers the feeling of owning his computer again has no price. I’ve been a pop!os user too for quite a long time and it’s very polished, but too fisherpricish for a desktop to me.

I don’t think distros with older kernels should be generally suggested to newbies who can have a smattering of hardware. Unsupported hardware can be such a showstopper for new users.

I have installed Zorin on my parent's 10 year old computer. They use it for browsing the internet and some video calls. Zorin works like a charm, and they have not had any major issues.

Stories of people giving grandma a Linux computer always surprise me.

Zorin in particular was the distro that made me stop using Linux a few years ago, the day I turned on my computer and all of the sudden everything was completely messed up. Took me a long time to recover the DE and get everything back to working condition. Immediately after I went back to Windows for the first time in years, which I don't love, but at least the OS is alway there when I turn the PC on.

How do people give their grandma a Linux pc and never hear from them again? Obviously a catastrophic failure like mine is not normal; and if you need 100% stability for a mission-critical system, I don't doubt you could accomplish it much better with Linux than Windows, but that's not by default. Do you disable automatic updates on grandma's PC?

My grandmother was fine for about a decade. I did all the maint. stuff though, including a couple rough upgrades, one where I tarballed her home directory did a clean install and restore the tarball. In the end, it worked fine for her, as she really didn't change much... the only apps she really used were the browser and a handful of old Windows games installed through Wine.

With complete sincerity: I would like to hear as much about your linux-using retro-gamer grandma as you feel comfortable sharing, she is an icon.

She had a couple old card and casino games she bought in the later 90's... they installed in WINE without any real issues at all, total surprise to me, but they were likely just using simple GDI calls or whatever, prior to DirectX really taking over. I had also installed a handful of similar games via the distro repositories.

She mostly used her browser for email (Yahoo) and to order grocery delivery once a week. She emailed and shared pictures with extended family quite a bit.

Nothing really extreme at all, and not really a heavy gamer by any means. Just casual play. Oh, she liked a few of the columns/gems type games as well.

And here I am looking at the Windows 11 machine I keep around to play a few games that has forced to me to do a complete reinstall four times because Windows updates broke it overnight, even though I had auto-update turned off...

I think it depends a lot on who you're recommending something to. A fellow developer who wants to be productive? Probably Arch or CachyOS. Someone curious about Linux but needs a lot of existing resources and hand-holding? Probably still Ubuntu, or maybe Mint. Someone who wants to really dig into things and see something new? TempleOS (RIP Terry). Someone who likes the same type of programming languages as myself? Mezzano.

Never heard of Mezzano until today, looks neat! Do you run in a VM? How much general purpose computing do you do in it?

ArchLinux is the best alternative for yesterday's Windows 10 user

How so? Arch is much more technical and does not even come with a graphical package manager by default.

I love Arch, but suggesting that even an above average Windows 10 user migrate to Arch without prior Linux experience is just irresponsible. They may be left with an unusable machine if they format their "C:" drive but don't manage to properly install Arch and a DE. Mint or even plain Debian seem far better for this, and updating such systems is usually more predictable.

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