So i was surprised today when my fiancee told me she was thinking about switching over to linux. Surprised because she is absolutely not technically minded, but also because she was weary about having Microsoft AI slop forced on her PC every update. ( i’m so proud!)

Now i’ve used a little linux but i’ve always been a holdout. Won’t stop me from moving someone else over but i have too much going on in my setup to deal with that right now. So i’m not super versed but i was able to give her the basic rundown of what distros are, concerns when switching, what may and may not be available, shes still on board so we’re doing this! Knowing her she would like to not have to transition too much, whats something fairly hands off and easy to learn. I’ve heard some good things about mint from hanging around you nerds the past few years but also some not so good things, any suggestions?

next concern is what kind of transfer process is this going to be? i have some spare HDD’s so we can try and get everything ported over but i’m so busy with school right now i can’t quite allocate the time to really deep dive this.

Any help is appreciated, cheers!

      • Staff@piefed.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        You can go with the Slowroll version which is Tumbleweed but with a week delayed updates which might prevent issues in updates you’d have on Tumbleweed. Personally, been with Tumbleweed for a year now and haven’t had issues with updates.

        You need to apply the update from time to time. You’ll have to teach the user to do that. But you can create a simple alias in the terminal so they don’t have to remember the update commands (system update and flatpak update cmds).

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
        5·
        13 hours ago

        I like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed: everything’s up to date and it’s very stable for a rolling distro. Very occasionally an update is problematic but there are easy rollbacks thanks to btrfs. KDE Plasma is an easy desktop environment for a former Windows user too. One weirdness is you’ll have to get used to using the command line to update native packages and Flatpaks (“sudo zypper dup” and “sudo flatpak update”), because the GUI updater apparently isn’t really intended for the rolling distro.

          • illusionist@lemmy.zip
            3·
            14 hours ago

            On atomic distros, you install stuff mostly via flatpak and distrobox. I’d even recommend using distrobox on traditional systems because you can just kill the box if you don’t want it any longer. You can have multiple package managers at the same time installed without problems, e.g. yay, dnf and zypper. I guess you could even take your box with you when switching to a new distro (e.g. when switching from atomic fedora to opensuse as I did recently) but I have not yet done that.

            Yes, management could be more end user friendly, but it’ll get there