Since Windows 11 has recently become borderline unusable in many old PCs, I’m trying to convince some people to try Linux. Problem is that I have spent the last few years with a custom built Archlinux and have no idea what is the recommended starter distro nowadays.
They’re stubborn and not willing to learn how to use a terminal or anything of the sort, which clashes with my CS background experience too.
Any recommendations? DPKG distros are okay, but bonus points for rolling release ones.
Edit: thanks for the help y’all! I’ll take a look on Mint and maybe Manjaro.
Fantastic reply, thank you very much. I’ll see if I can get them a USB Mint for a test drive. Thanks!
Also, I forgot to say, to save ram on ram-starved PCs, use a single color background (my favorite is #317E9F). Or if you’re going to use an image, make sure its pixel size is exactly the screen res. If you use a 4k image (that Mint usually defaults on), on a small screen resolution, you’re wasting anywhere from 50 to 100 MB of RAM (because you count it uncompressed in memory, not how much storage it takes). Little known tip!
If you have the funds for it, or your friends help you with the purchase, get some usb sticks for $9 each (Mint requires 20 GB of space with a few apps in it, so a 32GB stick is enough, but it won’t be enough for long if they play with Steam, so a 64+GB stick is preferable), and install Mint on one of them (I use this https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917k6WqTLSL.__AC_SX300_SY300_QL70_FMwebp_.jpg , because it’s tiny, it’s really annoying to use a large usb stick permanently). Make sure you create a /boot partition (512 MB, fat32, with the esp/boot flags on it), then a 4 GB swap partition, and then the / partition for the rest (unless Mint does that automatically for you, make sure there’s a swap).
Then configure it to be as user friendly and as clean as possible (I configure Cinnamenu to be clean of useless things, like emojis menu items etc, there’s a good cinnamon menu editor installed by default but they don’t expose it on the menus). Go through all the prefs to get sane defaults for everything. Install using the command line some apps (they will use the flatpaks, but it’s best to get the important apps from the repo): gimp, steam, a few time-wasting games as in my screenshot above, inkscape, kdenlive, shotcut, audacity, vlc, xsane, scribus, homebank, foliate, krita, htop/neofetch for your own enjoyment, and then from the web, download the .deb files for onlyoffice (it has better compatibility with MS formats than libreoffice), chromium or chrome (for those who can’t live without it), Obsidian, latest Blender, and localsend (they can send files between phones, and other OSes that the app is installed too), and Xournal++ if any of your friends have a touchscreen laptop. That’s enough to get anyone started.
Once you’re 100% sure no more changes are required, dd/clone that one usb stick to all the other ones (so you don’t have to do the installation multiple times). Then, give to friends.