Mint.
I have my mum (67) and my partner using it.
Libre office and Firefox cover 99.9% of all the things mum actually does.
My partner uses blender, krita and audacity also.
Auto updates... Almost no tech support.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Linux mint makes sense. Auto updates and its hastle free for non techy person like me.
Even if I'm doing something crazy , chatgpt to the rescue.
Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like Cinnamon or Gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don't know what you're doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you go
Any immutable distro would do I guess
That is, if you have experience running immutable distros yourself and are able to serve as a tech support for them should they ever need it.
A lot is different under the hood, and general Linux knowledge doesn't always help.
Fedora Silverblue.
Or really any immutable OS; they would have to go way out of their way to even edit system files, much less break the system. I just recommend Silverblue because gnome is really hard for an inexperienced user to break.
Any of the ostree variants of Fedora, be they Fedora Official or downstream ones like the Universal Blue family
I've got my wife and 5 year old on slackware. They wouldn't know how to screw it up if they wanted to!
Now that's an extreme choice :D
Doing a lot of tech support, don't you?
Nope! Everything just works and it's rock solid. It's also been my daily driver for over 20 years.
I was doing a lot of tech support when my wife was on endeavouros and my daughter was on bazzite. Tbf, my problems with bazzite were probably down to me not understanding the immutable distro concept.
I can absolutely expect Slackware to be solid; my concern is about user-friendliness :D
Not the easiest distro out there.
On the topic of immutable distros, I more or less understood them and kind of managed to work fine with them, but, honestly, I feel all they do is enforce a certain way to interact with the system that makes screwing it up very hard - but on the other hand, introduces a slew of non-standard and sometimes complicated solutions newbies won't understand (even for veterans it takes a while to get a grasp on them). If you follow the same pipeline on a mutable distro, you get the same stability plus the ability to do a lot of things without jumping through the hoops.
Right now I ended up on classical non-atomic Fedora for this reason. It features a lot of safe practices from immutable distros - system snapshots before updating, prioritizing flatpaks, container-oriented terminal able to work with Distrobox among all other things - but at the same time it's a mutable distro able to work with everything else.
I think Slackware's reputation for being difficult dates back to the 90s when all linux was difficult. Slackware has evolved just like everyone else, just differently. It's easy to install, and works like any other kde plasma based distro if you choose the default full install.
The two biggest differences are no systemd and package management. Slackpkg functions somewhat like apt-get, but only for official packages and updates. Everything else can be installed with slackbuild scripts that can be automated with sbopkg. This process is similar to using the AUR with a helper like yay. And I have some flatpaks installed too.
Fair!
But still, an installation process that doesn't involve a package manager is a bit of a pain, comparatively. Flatpaks may certainly be very helpful, though.
If you're not going to give her sudo access then I'd say it'll be really hard maybe even impossible to screw up. Also maybe setup a cron job that'll do auto updates and if needed add in a check to make sure it isn't uninstalling anything. Also how about immutable distro.
BLUEFIN.
Or Aurora/Kinoite, for a more familiar experience
I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad's laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I'd set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)
Semi-serious suggestion: Guix or NixOS. They're not break-safe per se, but if they do break something, you can use the OS' previous generations to go back to an operational state. Just... don't let them use the commands that delete older generations.
(Semi-serious because they're both not exactly mainstream and not eactly conventional in their setup.)
Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, "turn it off and then on again" will almost always work to fix the OS.
I've installed popOS to a couple of relatives, haven't had anty issues for a year so far. Can definately recommend!
I prefer Manjaro, super easy.
I'd rather recommend Manjaro to those who want to start out simple, but then get into the details of Linux.
Unless all you do is browsing, Manjaro starts easy but then has a steep curve because it's still Arch, with the added issue of practically every Manjaro newbie ignoring warnings about AUR and getting to taste the consequences.
It will require you to work with the terminal, troubleshoot, and get to understand your system. This is not bad - that's how I got into Linux and never looked back after all all, and I generally don't join the "Manjaro bad" crowd - but this is not a bulletproof "SO distro".
Nixos with whatever defaults you don’t want her touching, then she can use nix profiles to install extra software if she wants
Has "non techy" evaded you ?
In fairness, there are attempts to make Nix user-friendly, such as SnowflakeOS, featuring a lot of improvements including a graphical app store etc, but those are alpha and not ready for an average user.
You can install imperatively using nice profiles. So you the OP can set up the base distro in a way their SO can’t break. Then any extra software can be installed imperatively using nix profiles. Any installed software will work as normals. Checking the normal places for configurations if their SO even needs to go that far
Fedora Atomic desktops, specifically Kinoite with KDE6 works well for me, and is basically unbreakable due to the way it works.
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Linux mint is a good, "click first" distro that won't break without root + will be easy for her to use. For something with a more modern desktop and more recent updates, Bazzite is really good at just working and (in my experience) has never broken
For me, Mint borked the network after an update. I never got to figure what was wrong - the local network worked, the Internet connection was there and other devices worked through the same router, remote IPs were unreachable so it's not a DNS problem, etc.
But I might have had an edge case.
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I've set up Linux mint for my sister in law and didn't hear from her the whole two years she was in college. But nowadays we have immutable distros. They're fantastic for a set it and forget it kinda thing. They're solid for those who don't want things to break.
Aurora by Universal Blue. She will be unable to break it, and it's so freaking easy to use and install.
Depends on the use case. For example, I actually managed to bork Aurora to the unbootable state while trying to make a VPN work properly a while ago. It didn't live long :D
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I’m gonna be the boring guy.
RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)
Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.
Benefits:
- Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
- Actually works
- Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
- If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
- Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.
Drawbacks:
- Boring (for you)
- Not ideal for gaming
If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.
Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.
In the era of Flatpak, I kind of agree with you.
The primary drawback is the complete lack of packages. A home user is going to want something not included and then things fall apart. Flatpaks and Distrobox have made that a lot better.
If you could get away with a RHEL core and Flatpak for apps, you would have a pretty solid setup for a “normal” person.
I both agree with you, and kinda disagree.
If you venture into installing Flatpaks on such a system, just keep in mind that:
- Auto updates must be on
- The Maintainer of the Flatpak in question must be expected to provide security updates for the next five years or so. Personally, I’d only use it for packages provided directly by project maintainers (i.e. Dropbox from Dropbox Inc. as packaged by Dropbox Inc.).
Keep in mind, like 95% of normal people (we are not normal) don’t know what a package manager is and only use
- ”The internet”
- Webmail
- Google Docs
- Spotify
For that, we need the default desktop install and the Spotify app (probably a Flatpak). That’s about it. It’s a glorified web browser with batteries. Treat it that way and keep it that way, unless your SO has any specific needs and requirements.
The limited and dated package set is kind of a feature. Only packages that should work until the laptop breaks, and only packages that won’t change randomly when you update (mostly).
Really seems like we are agreeing. I get that the limited package set is a feature. I also get that it is both too small and too enterprise to satisfy most people you would describe as a “SO” precisely because they are probably normal people.
You gave the excellent example of Spotify and suggested a Flatpak for that. Honestly, I am not sure where we are in disagreement. Especially since I started by “mostly agreeing” myself. We even agree on that. :)
Use Bluefin or some other immutable/atomic distro.
The upside is that it's rock solid and will likely never fail in a way that cant be easily rolled back. The downside being that it's slightly more complex to administer than a traditional distro model (which probably isn't a big problem if you are going to be administering your SO's PC for the most part.)
Bluefin is basically a more general desktop, less gaming-focused version of Bazzite. Bluefin uses Gnome, but there's also a KDE Plasma version called Aurora.
An immutable distro would be a good choice. They are distros designed to be more resilient against failure. For a gamer, bazzite is a solid choice; otherwise, silverblue.
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