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Ask Slashdot: Easiest Linux Distro For a Newbie
anymooseposter writes "My mom is taking a computer class at the local Community College. she asks: 'I need to download a Linux OS and try it out for class. The assignment is to use an OS different from what you normally use. Well, since I use Windows and OS X, the assignment suggests Linux. But, my question is, what is the easiest version based on Linux for me to put on CD and try? I saw several on the web. Any thoughts off the top of your head?' What Linux Disto would be easiest to set up without having to resort to dual booting and/or driver issues?"
DON'T run Linux under Windows. Just don't.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
By FAR the easiest and most comparable distro out of the box to Windows is Linux Mint. All of the good parts of Ubuntu with none of the broken stuff. It also comes with all the restricted multimedia drivers that make things easy to use in Microsoft land.
Ubuntu using Wubi is pretty brain dead easy to install. No partitioning required, it lives inside your Windows filesystem and handles adding itself to your boot menu.
Performance is slightly degraded, and bugs can come up with regards to hard reboots, but really it's the best option I know of if you're not running off a USB stick or DVD.
Just go with Ubuntu. Its designed to be friendlier for beginners and there is pretty good documentation on typical end user wants and needs. Some other distros can have more of a by-nerds-for-nerds orientation and the community response to beginner questions is "go read the man pages", or the distros can be more puritanical in nature, no binary drivers etc. There's nothing wrong with these perspectives, unless you are a beginner just trying out Linux rather than someone who has decided to dedicate themselves to Linux and is willing to invest the extra time. Fedora may not be bad for beginners either.
... :-)
Now let the flaming begin
Ubuntu is the most well-known distro for newbies, but I'd almost suggest Linux Mint which is just as easy but with less quirks.
Whatever distribution you choose, start with a LiveCD and boot from that. You won't have to make any changes to the computer at all. If you can install to a USB pendrive, it will be reasonably quick, too.
If the computer is reasonably hefty, with a modern processor and at least 1 GB of memory, I'd try Kubuntu 10.10 because I think the KDE desktop looks more like what someone used to Windows would expect. Otherwise, try Ubuntu 10.04LTS for the GNOME experience and avoid Ubuntu 11.04. It has an entirely different desktop environment (Unity) and is probably too buggy for someone whose never touched Linux before.
I haven't used Fedora in quite a while so I'm not competent to discuss its current incarnations. I've never taken to OpenSuSE, but I'm sure others here will tell you why to use that. Mandriva is likely to get some endorsements as well.
Linux Mint is easily the most Linux-newbie-friendly distribution I've ever used. It also scales well to an experienced user. It uses an Ubuntu base (unless you use Linux Mint Debian Edition but I strongly advise against that for a newbie).
Depending on hardware capabilities there are heavyweight (Gnome, KDE) and lightweight (Xfce, LXDE) versions.
You can install it using mintinstall (wubi) from inside Windows (you need to use the CD version for this, but it's then very simple to upgrade to the DVD version once you're inside Linux Mint). Doing this means you can dual-boot without repartitioning - for your mum this sounds like the best option.
I've got to break some news to you - You're mother is at the local community college trying to pick up D&D players.
Gentoo - By far the easiest!
* no need for a mouse to install it!
* don't have to boot a live cd
* don't have to dual boot (just have it take over)
* no hard to understand buttons - if you can read, you can install it!
why not?
Because.
The answer involves things far beyond newbie's understanding.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
there's really only a handful of distros I'd consider to be in the same category as Ubuntu for general ease of installation/use
I see you've never installed Windows. Every Linux distro I've tried (Except Red Hat, and that was back in 1998) was brain-dead simple to install and completely painless, even Mandrake back in 2003.
Try typing in that forty digit key with 1s and ls and 0s and Os. And sit there having to click "yes" or "no" every two minutes for a solid hour -- with a whole lot of reboots. Then installing every application you'll need to do any actual work.
Compare that to installing ANY Linux distro; two screens of choices (only one with many distros), wait 1/2 hour with no babysitting (maybe change the CD) and one reboot, and you have a ready-to-use, functional machine.
Comparing installing Linux with installing Windows is like comparing driving a modern car with a model-T hand cranked Ford (Windows is the model T). People only think Windows is easy because they've used it all their lives. Those of us that cut our teeth on DOS (or even earlier machines, like a Sinclair or an Apple II or a Commodore) know better.
Free Martian Whores!
As opposed to a LiveCD I would recommend installing it on a flash drive instead. The flash drive can be written to, so it can behave more like a real OS (allow you to persist files and settings after a reboot) and its just quicker than CD/DVD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
Linux Mint is definitely a better choice than Ubuntu, and not just for newbies. The UI and layout of everything is a lot nicer and more logical.
I think the easiest thing to do in this situation is his mother.
there's really only a handful of distros I'd consider to be in the same category as Ubuntu for general ease of installation/use
I see you've never installed Windows. Every Linux distro I've tried (Except Red Hat, and that was back in 1998) was brain-dead simple to install and completely painless, even Mandrake back in 2003.
Try typing in that forty digit key with 1s and ls and 0s and Os. And sit there having to click "yes" or "no" every two minutes for a solid hour -- with a whole lot of reboots. Then installing every application you'll need to do any actual work.
Compare that to installing ANY Linux distro; two screens of choices (only one with many distros), wait 1/2 hour with no babysitting (maybe change the CD) and one reboot, and you have a ready-to-use, functional machine.
Comparing installing Linux with installing Windows is like comparing driving a modern car with a model-T hand cranked Ford (Windows is the model T). People only think Windows is easy because they've used it all their lives. Those of us that cut our teeth on DOS (or even earlier machines, like a Sinclair or an Apple II or a Commodore) know better.
I don't know why I still consider this a technical forum. Almost everything you said isn't true. Windows 7 installs from a USB stick in about 15 minutes (longer depending on the performance of your system). The only choice is where to put it and installation completes and the system reboots. Windows starts and then some configuration questions are asked and I assume are required on other platforms (account name and password, date and time, and yes, choosing to enter the Windows license key or not). I feel like I'm leaving something out, but after these steps the system is up and ready for use. Because my hardware is relatively static, I created a small text file that makes installation silent. I boot from the USB stick and return to Windows ready to use. Then I can use it for as long as I want without doing anything other than patching. Or not.
I could compare that to my experiences with trying to install Linux on a set of raid disks without a wizard a few years ago but I assume it's better now so I won't condem the entire Linux platform on my bad experience (ancient history now). I also started on some of those systems you mentioned and got to be quite the DOS batch file developer along with higher level languages. I simply use and understand Windows because of the apps I develop/run and you didn't. That doesn't make Windows a less viable platform or me ignorant on the available options.
And I prefer to install only the programs I want to use. I hear of people who have issues with not keeping everything patched or turning off unwanted services. Possibly FUD but I'm not a Linux guy.
As opposed to a LiveCD I would recommend installing it on a flash drive instead. The flash drive can be written to, so it can behave more like a real OS (allow you to persist files and settings after a reboot) and its just quicker than CD/DVD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
Yup. And this should do the trick: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ runs on windows and Mac.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Windows runs the apps I use, and doesn't get in my way. I don't know what more I could ask of an OS, to be honest.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Sure... it's your mom's assignment. My grandpa is also taking Theory of Computation at his university and asking me why his carefully crafted Lisp code still doesn't solve the halting problem.
Your experience differs from mine. I have had hardware detection issues with most Linux installations every year from 2001 to 2007. It was only in 2008 or so that I started to consistently have my video card, wireless card, and sound work consistently right out of the gate with most distributions and even now I can't get Debian Squeeze or OpenSUSE to install. By comparison Windows is tedious to install but I haven't had an installation fail or fail to properly configure hardware since Windows 95.
I'm happy for you and the wonderful experience you've had. I haven't been so lucky.
Even better: Get unetbootin, use that to put Ubuntu on a nice big thumbdrive, and allocate a few GB for persistence. It's as close to a portable install as I've ever seen.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Historically, windows didn't fail to properly configure hardware because IT DIDN'T TRY. Only now ("only in 2008 or so") does it have even a modicum of driver detection. Windows didn't have video, wireless, or even wired networking out of the box. It worked after *you* installed drivers for it.
The vast majority of hardware detection issues on Linux have been because of hardware vendors.
Ah but you're one of those who "gets it" - that the OS is just a platform to run apps. If an os runs the apps you want and doesn't continually fuck up (and contrary to what some would have you believe, i can count the number of rebuilds i've needed to do with windows for my own systems on half of one hand in the past 3 years - and thats including a hardware upgrade) - windows vista / 7 fulfil this purpose.
If linux runs your apps, go for it. The OS is merely a platform.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I changed my mother from Ubuntu to Linux Mint around a year ago, and very quickly had to switch her back due to the endless cries of "it's doing something strange!". It was indeed doing something strange -- in around a 2 week period I came across at least two updates that insisted upon pushing Ubuntu branding to core parts of the system. What is the problem with this? Well, frankly -- some LM in-house programs broke, as they weren't expecting this change, but it was their own update system that allowed it to happen.
The main problems that I see with Linux Mint is that it has a very small development team, which appears to have led to significant oversights in the past, which have caused various issues requiring user intervention (for example, fsck on boot was completely broken in LM9, and would simply hang. This was on the tracker for a very long time, with the only message of hope being 'it will be fixed in LM10'.). This would be fine for someone who was more familiar with Unix problem solving, but frankly my mum and many others like her just want to sit down with the computer and have it work without need for troubleshooting. Sure, other distros (including Ubuntu) have messed things up in the past, but they have had a large enough vocal community to get a decent consensus on how to solve the problem. Linux Mint simply doesn't.
Linux Mint does a lot of things better than Ubuntu and in general seems to understand its demographic better (as it is, perhaps, a less diverse demographic). At the present time I would hesitate to recommend it for people who just want a works-out-of-the-box-and-stays-that-way experience, however, as the caveats are simply too numerous.