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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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it really depends on what demands you are going to place upon the system..
gaming? have weird hardware? you're gonna visit a command line and have to 'research' things...
but just basic tasks and well-supported hardware? many can give a mostly or even entirely 'point and click' experience.
i have a number of users on silverblue and endless that would be terrified if they ever had to open a terminal, and i rarely open a terminal on my own desktops (xfce manjaro, cinnamint, endless, silverblue)
lol, sorry but in what world do you live in? NONE of the OS "just works".
I'm sorry but this is such a trope. I watched someone using an up to date iOS phone. That thing is LOCKED down to no end, countless people claim that Apple are some kind of UX geniuses ... well you look somebody trying to do anything as complex as watching a video on this and it's a damn struggle.
Sorry for going on a rant here but the very concept is a lie. It's like Windows being easier to use, it's absolutely not BUT people have trained, at school (sigh) or at work, on how to use it. They somehow "forget" that they went through hours or even days of training and somehow they believe it feels "natural". That's entirely dishonest but why do I insist on this so much? Because it's unfair to then compare Linux distributions to things that do not exist!
What "just works" but STILL is not perfect or flawless, is SteamOS on the SteamDeck not due to any "magic" from Valve but rather because :
and as soon as one start to tinker with SteamOS on SteamDeck by replacing part, adding USB-C devices, remote the r/w restriction on the OS, etc then again "just works" becomes "worked at some point".
Solid rant. The amazing thing is how quickly people learn to live with whatever they currently have. It explains iPhone users.
I mean pretty much any distro can achieve that even Arch based ones. For example with CachyOS you could essentially run it with say KDE and never need to open a terminal at all. Cachy includes Octopi as its GUI package manager and it works well. KDE can also potentially handle the updating for you.
you could also run say something like Bazzite or Nobara which is essentially the same. Nobara does have it's own updater but i'll be honest it's kinda wonky sometimes and generally only starts off with access to its own repos.
Essentially at the end of the day the Distro doesn't really matter in most cases. As long as it can utilize a GUI package manager or some sort of "app store" and allows easy installation of something like KDE then you're good to go. The exceptions to this I would say would be like Gentoo or NixOS but as someone who uses NixOS...technically...it could potentially fit the bill. But that would require a bit of work to get it to that point.
Actually now that I think about it getting something like working on NixOS would be an interesting side hobby project to work on.
Linux Mint. Everything including full system version upgrades and GPU driver installations can be done via GUI.
The default look and feel is Windows-y, and the Mint team does a great job of pre-loading their distro with all the basic apps most people need, including a good printer app, scanner app, PDF viewer, media player, etc.
Getting hung up on feature parity with Windows and Mac is both a waste of time and literally impossible given the major differences between those two UIs. KDE already does most of that legwork anyway, and you can disable middle click paste easily.
IMO your time would be best spent making GUI tooling that doesn't already exist. Identify a pain point for you that forces you to the terminal and start there.
Why would you want to disable middle-click-paste???
I couldn't live without it.
The distro shouldn't matter too much, but the desktop environment will.
I recommend using KDE if you want something similar to Windows, and GNOME if you want something similar to macOS.
Using a GUI also isn't really dependent on the DE either for most programs. It's dependent on whether or not a GUI for it exists in the first place.
and it usually does, but software discoverability is still bad on linux
I installed Ubuntu on my father in law laptop years ago and it is still kicking. ( he's 85 this year) He does whatever he was doing before. My smallest which is 12 has zorin installed in her first peesonal pc and never asked any help. I think that the response greatly vary by the use of the computer you have.
Exactly.
My parents are fully on Linux since early dual core CPUs & the only things that didn't work or they didn't know how to do was after upgrades. "They" hopped many distros (some very niche, but lots of years on Debians) & I soon came to realise that I don't need to explain to them what I did when I would change distros.
They run Tumbleweed for quite a few years (5?) now with 0 work on my side (yay!!).
Then again, they (and other family and friends) aren't demanding power users, they don't even game.
I'm going to comment again, not to be an asshole, but because this is an entirelt separate stream of thoughts from my previous comment:
'GUI/UX for everything, absolutely no CLI' approach
That's not a distro thing, it's a Desktop Environment thing. I personally use GNOME on my daily driver, but I've also used Xfce and MATE and gotten away with those. I'd say that GNOME is probably the most "idiot proof," which is why I use it, but YMMV.
Linux "requiring the CLI" hasn't been true for quite a few years now, it just has stuck around for a couple of reasons (imo):
Tutorials/guides/advice about Linux tends to focus on the CLI because it's easier to figure out someone's OS and have them copy-paste a command, than to find out the specifics of their graphical setup and walk them through every window and button press.
New users need to know and understand the difference between Kernel, OS, and Desktop Environment to find the answers they're looking for.
If you tell Grandma that you installed Linux for her, the first time she tries to figure it out herself, she's gonna search "how to change volume in Linux" on Google, and she's going to be bombarded with a thousand answers all saying something different, most telling her to install programs, and most telling her to use the command line. Because Linux is not an operating system, it's a family of dozens of operating systems that can each be configured thousands of different ways.
If you tell her "I installed Fedora," she's going to run into the same issue, but on a lesser scale. At least there's only a few hundred different ways on a per-distro basis.
If you tell her "I installed GNOME," she will look up "how to change volume in GNOME," and find her answer. But now you need to explain to her the difference between the three, and when to include that information in her searches, and she will ask "why could I just say 'how to X in Windows?' and didn't have to memorize 3 different names for the same thing that all give me different answers???"
And yes, your grandma will just call you to ask anyway, but what about when it's your friend trying to figure it out at 3 am and he can't get ahold of you?
Meanwhile, the terminal is (more or less) distro-/DE-agnostic. So their options are to learn more about how is Opperating System formed than they'll realistically ever need to know, or use the reviled terminal. Such is the plight of DIY OSes.
Found this very interesting. Discovered I don't know the difference between the 3. Duck duck went to kernel and didn't really understand what I found. Can you explain the 3 like I'm five? Also - I have Linux mint - does that tell you what 3 I have and if not how can I find out?
Would suggest Linux Mint
I suggest LMDE not regular mint. Normal mint updates often and ocassionally with bugs while rare and mostly I see for gaming they do happen. Stability and reliability are king. So LMDE aka Linux mint debian edition. Its entirely the same as normal mint made by the same people but it's rock solid unlike Ubuntu version.
Sincerely I've used both to game and daily pc usage even work. LMDE no questions.
Regular Mint is much closer to what the OP is asking for. It removes the crappy Ubuntu stuff but gets to benefit from the good stuff like better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates and PPA support which is especially important if you have an AMD GPU as it's how you'll get up-to-date Mesa.
You won't get what you're asking for, because what you want is windows to not suck, not for Linux to have GUI. Me too tbf.
I started playing around with linux back in the Ubuntu 11.04 days. I was a tween with computers as a hobby and linux repeatedly humbled me and left me troubleshooting for hours. I had fun playing with it but I stayed with Windows on my main PC.
When I finally could not take it anymore in 2021, I started using fedora, which I grew to hate then moved to opensuse, which I grew to hate so I moved to Debian, and I've more or less stayed struggling in the Debian sphere since.
I'm a regular person, I don't code. I can't even hello world in python without help. I just need my laptop to be able to serve me the slop that I crave. If you're that person too, you're just gonna have to suck it up and learn how linux works. Suffer through it. You've been using windows probably since you were eating boogers, don't expect to just pickup linux over night. I moved to linux for political reasons, and I suspect you're doing so for similar reasons. It doesn't get easier, you just get better at using Linux.
If you want my suggestion, pick something based on an LTS distro. I like Debian, but I'm sure there is good stuff based on RHEL, SUSE, whatever. People will sit here and tell you how "out of date" Debian is. You're coming from windows, you probably regularly use software that nobody has maintained since 2009, you don't care if bonzibuddy.exe got an AI update, you just want to turn computer on, watch youtube, play vidya game. Don't let user johnthunderfuck69 in r/linux tell you his arch install has never broken in 20 years of using it. He is built different and you are not johnthunderfuck69.
I've had good luck with some of the gui tools included in MX Linux, SparkyLinux, and LMDE(mint debian edition). If you look hard enough between those 3 you'll probably find a big red button that you can click to order pizza to your house.
Choose Cinnamon, XFCE, or KDE as a desktop environment.
Is MacOs "absolutely no cli"? It wasn't when I was using it (admittedly, some 10yrs ago), except maybe for the basic things which any mainstream linux distro also provides.
What about Windows? Back in the day I would have paid to have a semi-decent CLI instead of being forced to use regedit (I hear regedit is still going strong, but I've not touched windows for an even longer period than MacOs)
What about Windows?
Every Microsoft forum suggestion:
sfc /scannow
Windows hasn't been "No CLI" since the requirements for TPM were added to Win 11 at the latest. Arguably, it's been even longer if you wanted to get any customization beyond "changing window border colors and desktop background," or if you wanted to do "hacker" stuff like remove start menu ads, but I guess most average users just didn't bother.
Resentment aside, this is more attacking the letter of the query than the spirit. At best, OP admits the terminal isn't bad and scary but still wants a distro that works best for GUI-focused people, at worst their eyes glazed over and they stopped reading everything you said after "when I was using it"
Been in and out of Linux since 2006.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon DE is the only distro I've ever used that worked flawlessly for everything without needing to use the terminal at all. It worked so well it was boring. It's the only distro I would recommend to a lay person
Kinda the same since 2006 (using Windows for gaming), however I never used Mint & for the last five (?) years installed Tumbleweed to various family & friends machines (it's my daily driver too).
I only add this to the discussion bcs it's a rolling release that is perhaps hard to break for a normal person & low maintenance (no real upgrades, zypper, btrfs).
I like to mention Tumbleweed bcs of how much time it saved me fixing other ppls puters (all of them very non-demanding tho).
Even on Windows and macOS you will have to use the command line for some tasks sooner or later.
no you wont
I have had to on multiple occasions, maybe we just use it differently
People do use it differently. I never use the CLI on Windows or Linux. I'm not in IT. I just do everyday user things. Many of which don't even have a CLI command.
I use the cli on macos often, because some apps need to be manually signed from the terminal. Power users on windows also use the terminal. However, the best of what you ask is Linux Mint.
Linux Mint
Sounds like you are asking for an iPad or a locked down Android pad. The commercial pad offerings to the non-technical public are GUI only, they spend a huge amount of man hours to create the UX. Even if the Linux desktops are getting better every year, you are accepting a limited experience without the terminal.
you'll become comfortable with the cli, it's seriously not hard.
all you need to know to start is:
then you can branch out from there
Linux Mint comes closest ime, but it really depends what you want to do. You should ask yourself this question: am I a power user? If the answer is 'no', and you just need to do basic media/productivity stuff, you're going to have a frictionless experience with most popular Linux distros. If the answer is 'yes, but I don't want to learn another operating system' then you should stick with what you know.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has a GUI for almost everything. It has a nice GUI for basic system config, and uses YaST2 for deeper settings, and it uses Discover for Flatpaks as well as system library updates.
Although, I have seen a couple people say Discover shouldn't be used for doing system updates because it can fail, and to only use it for Flatpak updates and installs. I dunno. But it's not like typing sudo zypper dup to do a distro upgrade is hard, so I just do that out of an abundance of caution.
OpenSUSE has some other cool features too, like having Snapper installed by default for system snapshots. It's pretty easy to roll back if an upgrade goes sideways. There's a boot entry that lets you open a previous snapshot as read-only and then you can make that snapshot permanent by creating a new top-level snapshot from it. So then you can at least use your computer while you try to figure out why the upgrade you did failed.
You'll probably want to use KDE as your desktop environment. It'll be somewhat familiar if you're use to Windows, and it has a lot of features that make it comfortable to use.
There are lots of good YouTube videos on why OpenSUSE is pretty cool. Check some out.
Second for Tumbleweed!!
The low-to-nothing maintenance rolling release (in my experience). I recommend it if you have to maintain computers of family & friends (no more release upgrades, out of the box snapshots, etc).
It's so friendly & hard to break (for a normal person).
I know opinions vary, but I also love zypper.
What is the LTT Linux test? I know its a reference to the LTT YouTube channel and the fail they experienced. But how do we a LTT Linux test and report it as a success?
LTT test pass: the distro must assume you can't read.
LOL fair enough. I guess a more friendly description of that would be "the distro must assume you don't read everything". Okay so that makes sense, given what happened.
Plain old Fedora works great. My mom uses it and is fine with just the app store.
I haven't kept up with that clown but if that's a reference to the time he attempted to switch, that was a top-gear-like slapstick show, consisting of making wrong turns at every fork and having outliers galore in the form of some hardware he and one other dude on the entire planet got. that show of his is infotainment, as in not a reliable source of information.
you go with the beginner-friendliest distro, with the widest distribution which is ubuntu. that ain't the distro I'm running, but it's something you need to go through to figure out how this shit runs. after you've been around the block a time or two and you start bumping your head at the ceiling, you'll have enough experience to switch to something better.
full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac
You want Windows or Mac.
If you want a computer that you can do stuff like web-browsing, document/spreadsheet/pdf/slideshow editing/creation, gaming, or multimedia processing on, there are distros and utilities on Linux that make those more-or-less easy and beginner-friendly,
BUT it requires divesting oneself of the habits, behaviors, and paradigms of other operating systems and being willing to learn anew. Community-based Libre software is developed in an entirely different way for an entirely different purpose; because of that, it is nearly impossible to recreate the same software as for-profit proprietary software. One is made by a community hacking together a functional system that suits their needs, the other is made to generate revenue, and thus has to keep users dependent on it by trapping them in dark patterns and igorance of its workings.
If you just want "Mac or Windows, but free as in beer," suck it up, pay the devil his due, and buy one of those OSes. Libre Software is an entirely different paradigm, and thus requires a whole paradigm shift before anyone will be happy with it; on-boarding people who aren't ready to divest themselves of the old paradigm just leads to disgruntled users who blame you for anything wrong with their PC, and creates a market void in the FOSS community ready to be filled by corpo proprietary slopware.
This is the right answer to this question. You have to be ready to learn a new OS if you want to switch to Linux. IMO that doesn’t mean you should expect to be doing everything through the command line but if even a ui difference is going to be a problem then it’s probably not time.
I see that as full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac (is no middle click to paste).
Linux is not Windows. Stop trying to make it work like Windows. Windows is crap and I don't want Linux to work like it.
Expecting Linux to work like Windows is how new people get frustrated. Have you heard anyone say that macOS needs to be like Windows to succeed? Of course not. So stop saying that about Linux.
Also, "no middle-click to paste" is astonishingly stupid, I've been using it hundreds of times per day for way over a decade now. It's one of the most useful and helpful features I've ever used.