with the recent windows news, I wanna switch to Linux. I tried mint a few years ago and was annoyed and frustrated with multiple things, like having to input the password all the time and the general ammunt of constant trouble shooting and needing a tutorial for the most basic things.
I want a distro that:
- Is very user friendly, ideally not requiring a terminal
- Is hard to accidentally fuck up
- ideally doesn’t require a password for every input
I basically just use my laptop to browse the web, draw in krita and use ms office apps (have been getting used to open office lately)
What do y’all suggest?
Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.
I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Out of habit, I recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)
On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.
I do have it on the side with some windows plug in right now.
try out Zorin OS
You’re probably going to find that the terminal will come up at some point no matter what version of Linux you choose.
For most I would recommend Mint, but since you mentioned having a negative experience previously, perhaps Zorin OS would be a better alternative?
If you want a hardened OS that would be difficult to break, an immutable OS may be a better route for you. Here’s a link with some options to choose from. My recommendation would be Fedora Silverblue.
As someone else mentioned, you will still need to use a password when making changes to the system. You can set it to boot without a password if you prefer to. I use Bazzite (gaming focused immutable OS; based on Fedora Silverblue) and I want to say 90% of the time I only need my password at boot.
If you need office apps, LibreOffice and Open Office should do what you need. MS office can be a challenge to get running, but the online web versions will run out of the box.
Hope that helps!
Did you set your Mint to autologin to desktop? If so then your Keyring is then locked and you get prompts to unlock it when you want to use anything that needs it - websites, software like email etc. The keyring holds your passwords and credentials to pass to on as needed and keeps your system secure. If you set your desktop to not autologin - i.e. have a login screen - your keyring is unlocked automatically as you log on to the PC and you don’t keep getting prompts to unlock the keyring. You can disable the keyring entirely or give it a blank password, but it’s better to use the login screen to keep your device secure, and let the keyring do it’s thing in the background even though “login automatically” is so easy to tick and use. The wallet is the same concept on KDE desktops.
Otherwise the only password prompts you should get are similar to windows - when you want to make system level changes.
I’d recommend OpenSuSE Leap with KDE. User friendly, stable, with a good GUI for making all system changes. Fedora KDE is also a good popular distro; I’m not sure how good it’s GUI is but I’d be surprised if you need to use the terminal. People often recommend the terminal (because it IS quicker - often one step instead of “go here, click here, click here”) but there is usually a GUI way of doing everything.
if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.
fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.
silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.
Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.
Windows troubleshooting is always SFC and DISM as the new “have you tries turning it off and on again” default first recommended step lol.
I’m sure you could manage to do a lot of things without a terminal on something like Fedora or Mint, but you really should just learn to use the command line. If you’re expecting it to be anything close to the windows command line it is not, it’s way easier to use and you’ll be able to do things so much faster than you ever could with a gui on windows. Learning everything you really need shouldn’t take more than a couple hours.
The one other option I can think of is ChromeOS Flex, but even there you’re going to have a way better experience if you learn to do things from the command line when appropriate
What’s your favorite color? Pick the distro with that color in their logo.
90% of the reason I’ve ended up with Manjaro
I’ve personally started using KDE plasma shell version of fedora, its as close to being windows (in terms of technical functionality) without actually being windows. On top of this you have the fedora community, and in a time where access of information has gone to shit, you can be rest assured that someone will get to your question or you’ll find an answer to a question you may have on fedora.
ideally not requiring a terminal
No chance, sorry. Look at every Linux distro in existence and you’ll find the terminal pinned in the Dock. Learning to use it is just part of The Linux Experience.
ideally doesn’t require a password for every input
You can enable autologin, but in my experience this just means you have to enter your password in every time you open a new app. You can look into Howdy. Basically the Linux equivalent of Windows Hello. But this will require terminal to configure as well. And most likely still wont work because biometric hardware is rarely compatible with Linux.
Zorin is user friendly. You may still need to use a password for doing updates.
If you game, then probably Bazzite.
If you hate the command line you could try tumbleweed, you will have Yast2 GUI apps for everything yo want to alter on the system. And it has automatic snapshotting if out you mess things up, you can boot to a previous snapshot. Howeverits will require a password whenever you want to make system changes. And a learning curve compared to other distros.
Not really getting away from typing a password, that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
As someone who uses and likes tumbleweed I don’t know if I would recommend it for inexperienced users. Once you start adding third party repositories for things like video codecs, dependency issues can get really nasty. Zypper will always offer you solutions to resolve them, but if you aren’t careful which one you select you can easily do stuff like accidentally remove your network driver which is a very annoying problem to have
Shhh don’t tell them about 3rd party repos. That’s why I somewhat disclaimed it with the Learning Curve, but having yast and snapper for me onboard as a new Linux user was very helpful.
Yeah but you kind of need codecs from packman or you’re going to have a bad time if you want like streaming or video calls. Unless more things are included out of the box now?
The inclusion of open H264 was helpful.
that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
All a malicious script has to do is alias
sudoin your .bashrc, and you’re fucked. The script can do that without privileges. It takes surprisingly little to go from “I’m only running this script without privileges” to getting totally owned immediately after.I guess that depends on distro, because sudo on OpenSUSE requires root password, so a script isn’t doing anything unless you enter the password
Yes, every distro requires a password for sudo. That’s the whole point of it. But editing .bashrc does not require sudo. You can add aliases and functions to .bashrc. A malicious script can append to .bashrc, and by doing so, it can alias sudo to be whatever command it wants. For instance, a malicious function. So the next time you run sudo it runs the malicious command, instead, which itself can act just like sudo and prompt you for your password. So now you just entered your password into a malicious function. Do you see the problem with this?
Then lock bash rc as read-only and root permission only, or disable aliasing altogether I guess
The script would place its own version of sudo in your
$PATHand wait for you to enter the password. Then it has it and can do what it likes with the information.Then it’d just tell you “wrong password” and forward you to the real sudo so that you can keep on working like nothing happened.
Edit: Or even better, pass your own commands to take over the whole system to the real sudo.
Disable aliasing I guess, or change to root owner, read only permission
Any one of the uBlue projects is perfect for this use case.
KDE: https://getaurora.dev/
Gnome: https://projectbluefin.io/
Gaming: https://bazzite.gg/Install and setup once, run forever. Immutable so impossible to break for a non-tech user, no package upgrades fuck-ups because updates are atomic and don’t touch the currently running system, are done in the background and are completely invisible for the user, great hardware support, based on Fedora. Regular users can only install Flatpaks through the App Store.
The only “maintenance” needed is a weekly reboot to move to the latest OS image.
As a personal feedback, I moved my gadget enthusiast but tech illiterate father on Bluefin. He can ruin a Mac in less than a few months. He can generate undocumented bugs on iOS by his mere presence. He hasn’t touched the terminal in his life. But somehow, Bluefin is still running perfectly after a year and a half. That’s how robust it is.
As a side note, passwords are extremely useful for basic security, and a password less life is extremely dangerous. The fact that you need to input a password tells you that you’re doing something that requires extra care and attention.
If you’re lucky to have a fingerprint reader that supports Linux (extremely rare unfortunately), you can get away with typing your password once at login and using your fingerprint for everything else.
It looks like you want SteamOS. I recommend either getting a Steam Deck, wait for the Steam Machine or install it compatible hardware if you have any. No Nvidia GPUs.
SteamOS checks all three requirements for the most part, maybe 3 not so much. But it will be near impossible to fuck it up as it has a read-only filesystem and all apps are installed through flatpak which are sandboxed similar to apps on iOS.
Based on those requirements, honestly, I’d recommend a Mac. Very user friendly, no terminal, very, very hard to fuck up, and only needs authentication when you’re changing system settings.
Macs do things a little differently, so you’ll have to learn the Apple way, but generally it’s all very dead simple point and click.
Thanks but no, I don’t want to buy a completely new hardware just to change my OS
macOS has a terminal and sometimes you will still have to use it even if not as often as *Linux, except that it works differently from GNU+Linux distros and even from BSD that you will have fewer resources to rely on.
