Hey, so my friend asked me which distro i can recommend for him. He basically used Windows his whole life. The recent developments of Microsoft though seems to worry him, so he want to give Linux a try.
I myself use Linux since around one year, so i'm definitely far from being an expert and i don't really feel i have enough expertise to give him an appropriate answer. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and love it, but i suppose it's not a good distro for him since he is not that tech affine and i suppose getting used to the terminal is a bit much too ask and could scare him away from the Linux experience.
So what im looking for is a distro, that is easy to use (for beginners & non techies; also not a rolling release) but is also good for Gaming (NVIDIA) and lightly everyday stuff. He uses his computer only for free time, not for his work.
I hope some people here have some helpful recommendations. I was thinking of maybe recommend Mint or Ubuntu, but i only used Ubuntu for a few days and don't really know much about it.
Thanks for the suggestion. Is it possible to avoid the console on PopOS? Can you setup everything by UI?
Yes. With PopOs you can do pretty much everything by UI
System76 is a laptop manufacturer that uses its own system, called PopOS. So they're aiming to be totally user friendly with the distro
Pop os is great for gaming and it comes with nvidia drivers installed
Personally I would recommend Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu so any issues should be easy to find and fix online. It's very similar in terms of the actual desktop to Windows instead of being completely different like Pop!OS. You should also be able to completely avoid the command line as well though I do encourage you to have your friend learn at least some of the basics so he at least knows how to use it.
I was looking for a distro too and I got recommended Pop OS a lot so you might ask your friend to give that a try.
My SO enjoys Zorin. Based on Ubuntu (like pop os) but had built in themes that makes the desktop environment easily customizable.
They found it easy to use and set up.
Zorin right now is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and GNOME 3.36, which are pretty much dated. If his friend has a gaming rig, it would be better to look for a more up to date distro
I was more going for ease of use. If you are playing the latest and greatest then I agree you’d probably want Arch based or at the minimum Fedora based distributions. However if you are playing some more stable games, or I do titles and Ubuntu is fine. The updates will come.
