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!

  • Ftumch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    261·
    1 year ago

    Any of the large, easy to use distributions should work just fine. I’d recommend a popular distribution because it’ll be easier to get help online. So consider Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Ubuntu and maybe Pop!_OS.

    I think the main consideration should be which DE (desktop environment) she’d like to use. IMO the main contenders would be:

    • KDE - Very configurable, nice looking, a bit heavy.
    • Gnome - Simple and very opinionated, so not very configurable, a bit heavy.
    • Cinnamon - Should feel familiar to Windows users, a bit faster than KDE and Gnome.
    • Cosmic - A middle ground between Gnome’s simplicity and KDE’s configurability, pretty fast.
    • XFCE - Very fast and light-weight, fairly configurable, but not very flashy.

    Based on which DE she prefers, I’d suggest getting a distribution that comes with said DE by default, for the best possible integration. How do you figure out which DE she likes best? Put Ventoy on a USB stick along with a few different Linux ISOs. Ventoy wil let you choose which one to boot from a menu. You could get the following ISOs:

    • Fedora or Ubuntu with Gnome
    • OpenSUSE with KDE
    • Linux Mint with Cinnamon
    • Pop!_OS with Cosmic
    • Mint or Ubuntu with XFCE

    Download an ISO for each, install Ventoy on a USB stick and copy the ISOs to the stick. Boot into each ISO and play around with the desktop for a bit. When she’s figured out which DE she prefers, install a distribution that comes with that desktop.