I guess I just don’t expect most beginners to want to read the breaking changes. Like when firmware packages recently changed, pacman paru yay and octopi don’t tell you about those breaking changes. You just get an error when you try to update. If you read the notes, you know to uninstall the old package, install the new ones, problem solved. What about using meld to merge pacnew? I don’t expect someone in their first week of Linux to figure it out. Even if they can learn it, I don’t expect a lot of users to want to.

Maybe I need to have more faith in people? I stuck to Ubuntu derived distros for about a year before I took on Fedora, and then eventually EndeavourOS where I learned the ins and outs of managing an Arch based system. I learned a lot, and I learned it gradually, which worked well for me, so I don’t try to throw other new users in the deep end of the pool.

I am a cachy user, and this is the worst possible advice. Arch based distros are not for brand new Linux users.

I second everything above. If you use Fedora be sure to follow a post install guide, there’s plenty more of them out there. Otherwise, Mint, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS are great options.

If you want a little more challenge, EndeavourOS and CachyOS are great introductions to Arch. Avoid Manjaro.

I’m really sick of everyone suggesting Bazzite non stop. I’m a serial distro hopper because I love learning about various distros as they grow and change, and bazzite and other immutables have always been problematic and janky for me, and their immutability makes it difficult to problem solve with tried and true resources and methods.

I’m not recommending Nvidia. I’m making a point by giving an example of the procedure for installing drivers for the most common GPU (by a wide margin, amd and intel market share accounts for single digit market share) being far more difficult on Debian than other distributions that are more beginner friendly.

Did you even bother to read the thread?

I get so frustrated hearing this take over and over again.

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

This is the process for installing the DKMS Nvidia GPU drivers on Debian.

The process to install said drivers on Ubuntu, Pop, Mint, etc, is literally clicking an icon.

Yes, following the manual is easy for you, and easy for me. It’s not easy for the tech illiterate elders in our lives. And it’s not easy for me to drop in weekly to solve their problems either.

I’ve ran Fedora on and off for years, by my measure, it’s not old man proof.

I run CachyOS with Hyprland, after using EndeavourOS for quite some time. I definitely recommend either one, if you’re willing to learn to do things via terminal.

After a fiasco with my 72 year old father in law’s laptop, I no longer recommend Linux Mint to people. On a fairly new Asus, multiple attempts at installing were needed to get it running, and he had constant issues that pushed him away from it. Installed Ubuntu for him, no issues over the past year. Sure it has snaps. He doesn’t know the difference and everything seems to be working fine. The goal is no IT support calls from the old man and Ubuntu achieved it.

Just spitballing, because honestly the amount of effort that must go into sustaining this attack in the long term just baffles me. Like, why?

I wonder if it could be a state actor? I can imagine that the powers that be in MANY countries could be motivated to keep users away from operating system software that isn’t spyware.

My vote is Fedora, but Pop is a good choice as well.

Maybe I’ve been hitting the hopium pipe too hard….

Yeah. But for a kid who’s not going to give a shit about the difference between snaps and flatpak, just install mint or Ubuntu and call it a day. Unless you’re popping the hood and rifling around breaking things, they basically install and administrate themselves.

Maybe I’m on one about it because the last time I was on this subject someone was suggesting Debian for a young kids first computer to play Minecraft on. Debian is good for a lot of things, but not that, and when someone says any Linux distro is “easy” I think “someone who knows nothing about Linux can run it just fine” easy.

So they’re all just going to spring for new machines when Microsoft pulls the plug on win10?

I have a 5 year old niece and 73 year old father in law running Ubuntu. Everything is relative right? To me they’re Linux illiterate, if not computer illiterate. It’s not meant to be an insult, and I’m regularly amazed by some folks inability to get what they’re looking for out of a search engine.

All I’m getting at, is that Debian isn’t “easy” to everyone.

Setting engine timing when replacing a timing belt is easy to my brother in law who’s a car guy, but if I watched a YouTube video on it I’d probably still botch the job and blow my motor. It’s easy to him. Not to me.

To us it’s easy, but not to the computer illiterate. Debian is at least as difficult to a Linux illiterate newcomer as Fedora is. You want functional multimedia codecs? Thumbnails for video files? Drivers for your Nvidia card? Drivers for peripherals that aren’t directly supported by the kernel? Distributions that people like us avoid, mint, Ubuntu, etc, make all of that happen for you, or at least guide your hand. A newbie installing Debian for the first time isn’t even going to know what they don’t have and need to find.

I see this attitude a lot, and it does nothing for the Linux community. We’re about to be flooded with ex windows users in a few short months, and they arent RTFM certified Linux users like we are. Repeating the mantra of “read the documentation” and “it’s easy already, duh” is just going to leave those people begrudgingly buying new hardware that they don’t need when they hit those early Linux speed bumps and see comments like yours making them feel like idiots.