Install gentoo
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What, no LFS?
What? It's just a bunch of scripts, nobody actually does that
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don't like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Good points.
I will also add that Bazzite isn't just for beginners, it's just more friendly towards them. I've been running it for like a year now and it's just fantastic.
Almost boringly stable
I would suggest whatever you pick, it should be a similar base to what you run or are most familiar with.
If you run something Debian based, you should recommend something Debian based. Fedora, Arch, etc.
The same is also true for desktop environments, if you use KDE, recommend KDE. If you run something not necessarily beginner friendly, recommend what you're familiar with.
At some point you're going to be asked questions, so the more familiar you are, the better for both of you.
Why do you want to start a distro war?
Is this with the intent of trolling our community?
"Let many flowers blossom".
Comma splice akimbo.
AnduinOS
start with something simple that’ll teach the basics of Linux – like LFS
There are so many resources on what to pick as first distro. I do not understand why people don't check those out first ...
The one she likes... How about listening to her needs, and then show here some examples, and let her choose?
I'd present her with Mint and Ubuntu - and then what you know is her "style"...
If older computer that works fine, I'd get a new 780m (Amd) mini pc. They support 3+ monitors, have 2 network ports allowing to "daisy chain" the old computer. No transfering of anything, or worrying about getting old stuff still working.
Deskflow is a mouse/keyboard sharing app. If you keep old computer in sleep mode you don't need extra keyboard/mouse, but power outages, mean that if you don't have a floor standing old pc you can stack old keyboard/mouse on top of, then you will need to occasionally plug in keyboard and mouse into old computer to get deskflow restarted (if you don't put it as autostart).
It's far more convenient than dual booting. Can use resources from both computers in network, and seemless mouse/keyboard focus. Switching 1 monitor for occasional use is better than dual booting, because rebooting on older computers especially is slow.
Deskflow needs a modern kernal linux distribution. Ubuntu 24.04 is recent enough. Linux mint has not upgraded kernel yet. AFAIU, the only difference between mint (recommended here) and Ubuntu is a slightly prettier version of kde.
openSUSE.