Linux

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.

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 :

• the hardware is very limited (basically selected to work well for it)
• the use case is very limited (start Steam, play)

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".

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.

Would suggest Linux Mint

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)

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.

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

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):

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

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)

Even on Windows and macOS you will have to use the command line for some tasks sooner or later.

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.

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.

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.

Linux Mint

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.

Plain old Fedora works great. My mom uses it and is fine with just the app store.

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.

you'll become comfortable with the cli, it's seriously not hard.

all you need to know to start is:

• ls (list files)
• cd (change directory)
• nano (edit text file)

then you can branch out from there

Bazzite is the correct answer. Or steam OS. Anything immutable. Mint is not the right answer.

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.

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?

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.

OpenSUSE has YaST which allows for more GUI customisation than some other distros. Might be worth seeing if that is what you are interested in.

What kind of contributing?

If you mean actually adding code or packaging or testing or anything along those lines, you’re probably looking for gnome. They hate normal linux stuff like middle click paste.

If you mean contributing by using linux, just pick something and start. You’ll have a lot to learn no matter what so there’s no point wasting time trying to figure out what you’re gonna want and working towards that.

If you mean putting other people on linux, don’t do that. It will make them unhappy and cause you lots of stress and work. Find a way to keep them on the systems they’re familiar with, either by using the well documented windows 10 iot ltsc or the accessibility options in macos. People deserve to choose weather or not they switch operating systems and when those decisions are made for them it needs to be done by those who will be working with them every day.

It would be helpful if your example of behaving identical to macos or windows were more clear, since macos and windows behave wildly different from each other. It’s like saying you need a normal european car that works just like your 2500 Silverado or civic si.

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.