yes solus is a decent distro and easy to learn
the only issue ive had with many ubuntus is the ever changing repositories. you get no notice of when a new repository comes into existence or when one becomes defunct.
all you get is failed downloads of your apps or updates
I would love it if the official sites for the distros posted the repo changes then users could update their repository lists.
Some would argue that Gnome killing features for the sake of simplicity has crippled it.
Developers.
You say this, but then later recommend a website that recommends distributions to manually install. I don’t see anyone wanting to do that, especially those with no experience.
Gatekeepers.
I’ll recommend Ubuntu and Google.com. Good on you for wanting to work with someone for hours and hours or years and years. I don’t have that time, unfortunately. I used to be the family tech support, and I outsourced that job because it’s tedious, daunting, and no one listens.
You’ll get 5,000 answers for easy alternatives to Windows. You want a beautiful, immersive experience for new users, no one is going to agree on what that means. People will recommend XFCE, KDE, Cinnamon, and then start arguing about it. Some will drive by with Arch or Gentoo (or Void Linux).
I appreciate the enthusiasm, I am full force in pushing LInux to the masses. If Windows laptops were swapped with KDE laptops I don’t think anyone would notice (until they tried to install Office or QuickBooks or whatever). The community will be there every step of the way to stop you, however.
Hell, just look at the recent examples of Linus Tech Tips and Wendell setting up gaming environments in Linux.
“Fagbuntu”, and other colorful comments, as well as the flood of hate mail Linus received was enough to probably deter future videos.
Hell, Jupiter fraking Brodcasting, a pro Linux company with a slew of radio shows promoting aspects of the system, said it was bad (I disagree, I thought it was really well done, especially on the Level1 side).
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i usually spend a couple days familiarizing (a week if i hold classes for more people) and phone or text conference, but the primary things i focus on is teaching them to look for the linux alternatives to ms software that they normally use. that and point out resources for training that are available to them.
on occasion Ive had a couple who were to hard set in their ways but not for lack of trying!
one i had installed ubuntu for was upset she couldn’t play her games on and she put windows back in.
when i took my laptop down and showed her how simple it was to use dosemu and wine she just about cried and complained about how stupid she was.
not stupid but just impatient and the only stupid thing she did was not calling me before wiping it out.
This is the easiest and best Linux distro for new users imho.
Speaking of realistic alternatives (ie not Linux) the best one is macOS, with ChromeOS up and coming and possibly overtaking both windows and macOS.
you know I think we need to set up a page titled before you switch to linux with a few pointers of what to expect.
for example some distros have a graphical install. some have text based install. and that its best to google the install instructions for the distro they are choosing
as well as joining the user forum for that distro.
while it may not be “linux” ChromeOS is based on the linux kernel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_OS.
macos: while its not “linux” its much closer that people think!
The OS X kernel is based in the Carnegie Mellon University Mach OS, which was itself derived from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX. When Steve Jobs started NeXT Inc., he recruited most of the graduate students who had worked on Mach to make the NextStep OS. Avie Tevanian became the CTO of Apple (company) after Apple bought NeXT, and Steve reascended to the CEO throne.
UNIX is the name of the original system designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie during their time at AT&T in the 1970s. It featured a great deal of novelties at the time, including multi-tasking, multi-user support, time sharing, etc. It was written in language C, a high level language that made the OS portable.
It was a great software, but AT&T was not allowed to make money out of it. Due to previous lawsuits concerning monopoly, AT&T business was Highlanders regulated by the US government, so they could not become a software giant. They decided to lease UNIX to universities, with source code included. Students and teachers started learning UNIX internals and creating similar systems, all with certain level of compatibility.
Linux is just one of these compatible systems. It was inspired by MINIX, a simplified version of UNIX created by Andrew Tannenbaum for learning purposes. Linus Torvalds thought it was great to have a UNIX system running on x86 desktops, and soon decided to improve it. But Tannenbaum wanted to keep it simple, so Linus created a new system from scratch and released under a permissive license. I don’t know if since day one Linux was under GPL, but soon it became protected by this license, meaning that everyone had access to the source code at free cost. People started contributing, and Linux is what it is.
Note that Linux is not the only UNIX based system out there. FreeBSD, which is based on the UNIX system developed at Berkeley University, is another famous variant. Mac OS X also has a UNIX kernel. Even after all the years, these systems still maintain a certain level of compatibility, sometimes you just need to recompile a program to make it run.
Just append/edit/expound upon this:
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I feel like I need to share my own experience here. I’m pretty much a life-long noob and Windows user, who always bought something like a Gateway pre-built desktop.
Time having gone by, and my deep concern over my privacy coming to the fore, I’ve tried to embrace Linux, and I’ve been told many times that “Oh it’s so easy, try Ubuntu or Mint, you won’t miss Windows at all for what you do on your laptop, which is basically just email, web and maybe some time-passing gaming”
Since I simply don’t trust Windows, I’ve given it a go.
Well, easy to install is true for sure. I’ve not had any issues installing Ubuntu or Mint.
Aside: I also did a Linux experiment some time ago trying to set up a samba server (failed) and then a NextCloud server(failed) so I ended up using Windows Server 2016. The point of this segue is that I've also tried Puppy, CentOS, Fedora and Ubuntu server, so I'm probably less noob than the average noob, but still noob.
I’ve even run Ubuntu Studio and Kali off a Live USB without any initial fuss. I’ve given Linux a few weeks of effort, both in the Terminal, and most recently in the Desktop environment, which is all I wanted for my laptop. I nice OS that’s similar functionally to Windows, but FOSS.
For a couple days, I thought Mint was the answer. Ubuntu had decided to black screen on me when I tried to shrink the screen resolution. Since there aren’t any scaling options, the only choice to see larger text is to increase the whole screen res. Well that broke the whole OS and I didn’t know what to do. So…I deleted it and put Mint in it’s place, and initially it was great.
But it didn’t last. I had problems with keeping my bluetooth mouse connected. Blueberry, which comes with Mint, would not recognize my mouse every time I shut down the computer, so I’d have to repair my mouse every time. That was needlessly obnoxious. So I got in the terminal, got rid of blueberry and installed blueman. Which worked perfectly for like…three or four shutdowns. But after that, it just lost it. I couldn’t repair my mouse. Couldn’t figure it out in the terminal.
I hope you get where I’m going with this.
Linux is simply not ready to be a replacement for Windows. When things you take for granted like keeping a mouse paired, or being able to dim the screen don’t work it’s hard to overcome that. I’m willing to sacrifice the fact that some games won’t play, or that taking a snip is many more mouse clicks in LInux…or that Mint actually takes LONGER to boot than Windows 10…I’m fine with all that. Because that’s not crippling, and if I get to protect my privacy, it’s worth it.
But a mouse not pairing…or a screen not dimming (it’s really bright!) is just…unworkable. And when I talk to other LInux users, much of the time it’s like "Why don’t you try SteamOS, or…just fill in the blank with some other work-around that seems to me is just a denial of the inevitable truth. That without a strong and fundamental understanding of the Terminal, repos and how to use them and the core bits of Linux, it’s just not going to work well enough to replace Windows for life long Windows users like me who are used to things just working.
Then of course, when you say “Windows just works” to a hard-core Linux user, you get “hur-dur remember ME and driver this and driver that?” and I’m like…no. I’ve never had these issues with Windows that I hear all these other power users complain about…because I’ve always just bought pre-builts and surfed the web, did email and some light gaming. My life experience has been one of Windows always working.
My reason for wanting to switch has nothing to do with functionality. I really like Windows 10 (and as such, the Cinnamon desktop was an easy transition, so I liked that too) I like that I can just type the name of the app I want to launch, and it launches. I like that once I pair my mouse, it’s always paired. I like that I can dim my screen. And I’m sure there are dozens of other things I like about Windows that I take for granted.
But in any case, I feel like I’m a good representative of the general person who wants to switch to Linux, tries…but fails because Ubuntu or Mint…just aren’t ready to be that Windows replacement. Not because the desktop environment is the problem (it’s not). But because when something breaks, it becomes a monster hill to climb to fix it, and even fixing doesn’t always permanently fix it. Then it stays unfixed because you tried every help guide you can google, none of it works, and now you just have a broken experience.
So in any case, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that if I want to learn Linux, I need to start at the command line, and work my way up to the desktop, not the other way round. And that’s a truth that I would like to have known before I tried Linux at all. It might have been less frustrating.
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exactly the problem is no one reads everything and then panics when the s#!t hits the fan.
running in virtual machine.
to be honest people have rarely even heard of virtual machines, (vr yes because many have seen the goofy looking headsets)
those of us who have had some experience with different os’s and emulators know virtual machine applications.
Heck at work they ran an early linux app through portal in windows for production and every one thought it was a windows program none of them had a clue it was virtual machine!
so actually I dont really think the os’s need to be made easier to understand but the manuals and instruction guides do.
This really should not turn into the 17 billionth “Linux needs X to get more market share” thread. as I pointed out a week ago, it is very unlikely that it will go anywhere constructive because the OP is extremely nebulous and there simply is no direct answer.
and i agree with you here cli is a good place to learn about your system (if you have had a little experience with it!)
those of us who used dos, fortran, and other cli can figure our way around things. But and thats a Big But many people buying computers (a good 80 % have little to 0 experience with cli and get an gui os windows, mac, linux ) and expect everything to work perfectly out of the box.
and we know this is not the case! think how much it would bloat software to have every driver for every printer made, same with sound hardware, etc.
hardware manufacturers do not provide drivers for linux mostly due to the various types of distros and non competition contracts with microsoft and apple.
many dont offer the code to developers either and include clauses in their eula that the software cannot be de-compiled, so when the new all in one printer wont work with linux is it linux’s fault?
if your games dont work with linux the same question can be asked! they require windows in order to work that is not linux fault.
Im not saying linux is the answer nor mac or even windows but if you want to change i will help and hopefully not throw stumbling blocks in front of you.
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i actually have a favourite version of windows but due to hard drive size constraints had to abandon it when going to newer hardware.
It was NT Server! super simple raid setup and all.
of all the windows software ive used I do miss that one.
somewhere i have a copy of win 2000 and 2003 server buried in the file boxes and havent got around to tossing yet.
It’s not the “developers” so much who are crippling linux software.
It’s self appointed “human interface experts” who are doing it.
They spend 5 minutes looking at macOS’s Aqua and think they can make something “just as good” without any of the underlying infrastructure to make it actually work.
As per the other recent thread about what apple do well, in my opinion Aqua is actually the least impressive and least useful/user friendly part of macOS.
I for one love macOS DESPITE Aqua, not because of it.
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Don’t know about robo linux but ReactOS is unusable, not even beta…
Mint is so easy a truck driver could install it 
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Installation hasn’t been what i’d consider “difficult” since slackware 96 (or earlier).
The difficult thing linux needs to overcome is getting applications included that
- work out of the box with codecs, etc
- are network share aware, and don’t need convoluted bullshit to connect to and work from a network share - without copying the file to local storage first
- have the relevant features and don’t crash
Linux the platform is stable
A lot of the applications are TRASH tier at best. I don’t say that to shit on the platform, but its a simple fact. The big ones like Gimp are obviously not, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
feren os everything ive tested on it works out of the box.
downloading codecs from the software center is click and install (no cli work involved)
they do have terminal apps though!
its a little too simplistic for my taste but is good one to start with.
developing applications is a two edged sword because what a developer envisions is usually not what an end user might want and may not be compatible with all versions of linux
a block of code that may work in slackware may not work in knoppix and so on. but its a matter of how many are developing it. Gimp has been around for a while and may have many contributors to the code
the only way to improve the apps is to contribute to the code and submit it.
if your contribution improves the product you can end up on the developement team!
or you can rename it and submit it yourself.
that’s the beauty of the GPL.
imo there isn’t really an ‘easy alternative to windows’, as every OS will require some retraining on how a user interacts with it. Whether that is a little or a lot depends on the OS, the person using it, and the applications they expect to run on their computer.
If we’re talking ‘Windows-like’ OS’s, then Linux Mint Cinnamon is very similar in basic initial layout to Windows, and shares many libraries and similarities outside the UI to Ubuntu, so should be about as easy to troubleshoot most issues.
the problem with the gnu development model is that there is no incentive to make a product for people other than nerds who are capable of modifying the source or compiling it themselves.
so long as it scratches the itch of the developer, that’s enough.
in the real world most people want things more user friendly than the developer might be bothered with, and those who know what they want UI or feature wise are not capable of developing it.
I like elementary OS. If you can figure out Window’s arcane nature you can figure out how to use a Linux system with a GUI. There’s like 10% of the buttons you will find on Windows. It’s almost like Linux is for babies lol (if you’re using a normalish distro).
I’ve found that I have never really had to troubleshoot anything in elementary aside from compatibility issues with certain NICs (brand new ones usually don’t work). For every day use it seems like the shit just won’t break
Yeah like why don’t we have a fancy audio player like foobar on linux?