Ftumch

joined 2 months ago
[–] Ftumch@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Any of the large, easy to use distributions should work just fine. I'd recommend a popular distribution because it'll be easier to get help online. So consider Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Ubuntu and maybe Pop!_OS.

I think the main consideration should be which DE (desktop environment) she'd like to use. IMO the main contenders would be:

  • KDE - Very configurable, nice looking, a bit heavy.
  • Gnome - Simple and very opinionated, so not very configurable, a bit heavy.
  • Cinnamon - Should feel familiar to Windows users, a bit faster than KDE and Gnome.
  • Cosmic - A middle ground between Gnome's simplicity and KDE's configurability, pretty fast.
  • XFCE - Very fast and light-weight, fairly configurable, but not very flashy.

Based on which DE she prefers, I'd suggest getting a distribution that comes with said DE by default, for the best possible integration. How do you figure out which DE she likes best? Put Ventoy on a USB stick along with a few different Linux ISOs. Ventoy wil let you choose which one to boot from a menu. You could get the following ISOs:

  • Fedora or Ubuntu with Gnome
  • OpenSUSE with KDE
  • Linux Mint with Cinnamon
  • Pop!_OS with Cosmic
  • Mint or Ubuntu with XFCE

Download an ISO for each, install Ventoy on a USB stick and copy the ISOs to the stick. Boot into each ISO and play around with the desktop for a bit. When she's figured out which DE she prefers, install a distribution that comes with that desktop.