Ask Slashdot: What's The Easiest Linux Distro For A Newbie?

joseph Kramer -- a long-time user of both Windows and MacOS -- comes to Slashdot with the ultimate question: I've been lurking here for years and seen many recommendations for a Linux flavor that works. What I'm really looking for is Linux that works without constant under-the-hood tweaking (ala early Windows flavors, 3.1, 95/98). Does such an OS exist? For the record, I am not an IT tech. I just need something to work with the mechanical equipment it controls. Any recommendations?
When it comes to Windows and MacOs, he describes himself as "fed up with their shenanigans." So leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way for a newbie to get started with Linux?

Comments

Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer in my opinion is Mint, there shouldnt be tons of constant fiddling... However it is important to understand, Linux is still very much a power-user operating system... So far i havent seen any distro worth its salt that does alot of hand holidng.

Re:Mint

[hambone142]

I third Linux Mint. Just put it on a disc and boot from the disc to give it a try (or a flash drive). You don't even have to load the OS to try it. If you like it, you can dual boot it with Windows or overwrite Windows.

I installed it both ways on two laptops and I really like it. The user interface is similar to Widows so it should be pretty intuitive.

Re:Mint

[jellomizer]

The real question before the quick answer is what hardware do you have?
Mint and Ubuntu are relatively good at hardware support. However there may be that one piece of hardware that makes your experience difficult. An off brand wifi controller, an odd or too old or too new video card...
some distribution have a lot of these hardware drivers installed some may be missing that one particular devices some my be GNU pure so you will need to manually get a third party non gnu library to get it to work. Which may be annoying if say your wifi is out and there isn't an ethernet port.

Now Linux isn't horrible at hardware support and not meant to be scarry however some distributions work better than others based on different hardware configurations

Re:Mint

[present_arms]

Mint is a fine start. also think pclinuxos too, it's actually made to be simple and like mint you can have a variety of desktops disclamier: pclinuxos user and the person behind the trinity desktop version

Re: Mint

[Highdude702]

If youre new to Linux, Youre going to want to use Mint or Ubuntu, Both have a large community and very close operating systems to eachother. when youre starting out you want to be able to fix an issue with a simple google search. Mint or Ubuntu will make that happen.

If you want a one-line reply...

[ladislavb]

then try Linux Mint - it seems to be the most popular and the highest rated among new users. But if you don't mind reading a bit before making a decision, then maybe this link will help (includes screenshots): http://distrowatch.com/dwres.p... Have fun!

Knoppix (though maybe not a distro)

[dbIII]

I suggest running Knoppix from a CDROM or DVD.
Unless you specifically tell it to it's not going to change anything on your hard disk. You are not going to mess anything up by accident.
If you want to keep stuff save it to a USB disk, or even run Knoppix from a USB disk.
I've seen a lot of people who had never used linux before run knoppix with no trouble.

Re:Just use Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct answer to this is always...

1) Linux From Scratch, aka: LFS

- or -

2) FreeBSD

Once you learn either one of those two, from the start like good admins and hackers do, no other Unix will be a problem, nor will you be likely to switch.
Linux is NOT the end all be all all that's out there.
It's endless distro of the month waste of resources and its ripping of tools out from under you every year will drive you insane.

Same answer since always

[houghi]

The best one is the one the person uses you are going to ask for help. e.g. if you have a cow orker that uses Debian, and he is somebody that will be helping you, use Debian.

When I started I had nobody to ask and Google did not exist yet, so what I did was try out several of the large distributions at the time and the one I likes/Worked was S.u.S.E. (Now openSUSE).

So take a weekend and try out several of them. If you can not make a weekend available, you won't like changing OS and you will be a User (nothing wrong with that), not an admin on your own machine. Ask why you want to move to Linux and find a pre-installed system or let somebody else install it. As you won't tinker with your system, but just have it working, that would be the best solution.

The more important question is if you want KDE, Gnome or XFCE. And when you have decided on that, look at how to install new software and how upgrades are done.

I like YaST from openSUSE, because it is consitant for a lot of different things, not just installing software. You can also easily install XFCE, Gnome and KDE at the same time at the beginning to check them out.

I dislike Ubuntu for the main reason of how they handle root situations. Yes, I know you are able to change it, I just don't like how they treat it as default.

So try out several of them. https://distrowatch.com/?langu... will give an idea of popularity.

XUbuntu

[Bill Hayden]

XUbuntu is very easy to install and maintain. It has a familiar Windows-like file manager and toolbar, and does away with the horrid UI that comes by default with Ubuntu. I've used that on a daily-driver development machine for a number of years. Download at http://xubuntu.org/

Any of the common ones will do

[aliquis]

Ubuntu and Mint both try to be newbie friendly and are large enough.
Normal Debian which they are off-spring of (Mint grand-children) would likely do too though I know ..well, back in 2.x days you used to get a question how you wanted to merge configuration files and stick with what you had or get the new one or whatever and that kinda felt like a pain. I don't know how it handles if you've done any changes and that's likely when you get the most problem with it (which may still not be a problem.)

OpenSUSE work just fine.

Fedora likely work just fine too.

Where they separate is how you upgrade, Debian can update from one version to the next from within the running system, I think Linux Mint used to suggest that you simply reinstall the new version but by doing that you of course need to keep your /home and any other files you want to keep separate or backed up. The advantage with the later approach is that you can introduce any changes whatsoever, including really large ones and the system will still work and it won't be a problem. If you keep some old stuff around you need to know how to migrate it to the new.
There also exist rolling distributions or releases from those who use numbered ones where the OS constantly evolve and you just upgrade all the time. Then you likely get more upgrades and in the case of trying to decide what to do with old configurations and such maybe you'll get more work there but you will never have to deal with going from one version to the next of the whole OS instead.

Multiple of them also don't want to include non-free software by default but remain clean/more clean from that and as such you may not get the proprietary video drivers, Adobe Flash, video and sound codecs and such installed from the beginning but information about how to get that software installed too is readily available so it won't be a problem to install it.

There's some other distributions why try to be the most friendly and easiest and would include such stuff too but the problem with those is that they will be smaller than the ones mentioned above and maybe they just die off or get updates slower than the large ones or will lack the documentation you want at some time or what you find isn't exactly matching the system you've got and so on.

Someone mentioned FreeBSD too before but FreeBSD isn't Linux, FreeBSD/Linux to some degree would be but you likely meant GNU/Linux. There's step by step guides for how to upgrade one version of FreeBSD to the next to there shouldn't be a problem as long as you follow that to do that either. Maybe a few more commands but you're unlikely to run into an issue doing it so it will likely carry on very smoothly anyway.
Someone also mentioned ChromeOS but if so then why not go full-blown Android instead? Though I think they was supposed to merge. Running Android wouldn't be the worst choice. Valve should just release a version which adds upon Android if necessary to make the Linux games run on it too.

Re:Just use Ubuntu

[thegarbz]

Second vote with justification:

Ubuntu is primarily designed to be easy.
Ubuntu has one of the best explained manuals for a beginner on the internet, covering really how to do simple things to get a system working. I often look to other manuals to tweak or do something else, but something as simple as installing a printer the Ubuntu manual is fantastic.
Ubuntu is based on Debian which is an incredibly solid foundation for an OS.

A few other flavours exist like Mint, but they mostly arose from some design decisions that pissed off Ubuntu users earlier on, and are now easily customised away.

Re:Yeah, well

[CronoCloud]

I changed my video card to one that had HDMI audio. If I want to use my fancy sound card, I need to prevent the system
from defaulting to the HDMI interface.

Your video card can output higher quality audio than your "fancy" audio card can, really.

(Mint 18.1) fails to make the old interface available in any of its configuration options. Blacklist the HDMI module? Now
I don't get any sound configuration interface at all. I fumbled around on the forums for days. Nobody had a solution that
that worked, much less one that a noob could grok.

pavucontrol, run it. If pavucontrol is not installed, install it, it has more configuration options and is apparently NOT installed by default in Mint 18.1 It will show BOTH your "fancy" sound card and HDMI audio and you can switch between them on the fly. In fact you can choose which output an application uses on an individual level. For example you could have XMMS outputting to HDMI, while rhythmbox is sending output to your "fancy" sound card.

IMHO pavucontrol should ALWAYS be installed by default on pulseaudio using systems

More complete answer...

[evolutionary]

Okay, this is a serious questions and all us who know the power and importance of Linux should be give more complete answers. I see a few hear but none that feels complete so I'll give it a go:

For pure ease overall I would second the anonymous posting for Linux Mint. https://linuxmint.com/ It is overall the easiest to use for a newbies. The reason being that it has the best software package wizard/interface of the any distro I've seen to date. Runs virtually the entire Ubuntu spectrum, doesn't have odd experiments that we sometimes see in Ubuntu. I tend to prefer Mate (it's a bit older and uses fewer resources) but people wanting a more "slick" look will prefer Cinnamon. This is what you want if you are a pure desktop user. Especially for gaming. Plus Ubuntu has been caught doing desktop search data "deals" with Amazon (you can turn it off but it's not easy to find) so if privacy is a big concern, Linux Mint has to the best of my knowledge never given/sold data to Amazon. (see this link: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...). One thing I should point out, the Linux Mint team was until recently a bit laid back on security leading to their website being hacked. They are more diligent now but just something to bear in mind. But Linux mint is in my opinion the best distro for Windows Die hard users to look at to make the switch. (you have TONS of games from Gog.com and Steam.com for you gamers..) I'm not suggesting Ubuntu simply because Mint is more usable and when Ubuntu starting quietly selling user data to Amazon (they may not be doing it now, but once bitten), I felt they betrayed the community as they did not announce it openly but started doing it quietly and made the "off switch" as tricky to find as MS does with changing the default extension save option in MS Word/Excel.

That said, if you want similar ease but want to be able to do moderately easy admin style tweaking with a wide community help base, you use Mint Debian which uses a pure Debian file directory/location layout (Ubuntu and Linux Mint are Debian BASED but have a few tweaks/customizations that don't entirely match pure Debian specs but are compatible with the vast majority of Debian Linux packages/software).

once your are comfortable you can tweak the User interface to look like whatever you want. But...if you want a more Mac look/feel out of the box I'd suggest ElementaryOS. https://elementary.io/

ElementaryOs has the slickest look out of the box and while it says "for Windows users" I feel it's even easier for MacOS users making a switch. However, it is less mature which is probably why the packages are fewer and to expand that you need some knowledge a beginner would probably not have and the community base is significantly smaller (newer so this is to be expected.)

If you want a more server set of functions and flexibility, I'd suggest using Debian (http://www.debian.org) and set the login mode to Gnome Classic. It will disorient MS windows users at first but the transition is still easy and I've had office use it with no real complaints (just that it looks different but staff figured it out quite fast). The advantage that Debian has is it's a true server level OS (even with GUI) and the being the base of more "user friendly" distro has a HUGE community base that can get you through almost anything. I may be digressing a little but it's important to distinguish what you are using Linux for. others will say CentOS but for Windows users I'd say the Debian package system is more like what MS windows users are accustomed to as opposed to the RedHat package system which will feel more alien to MS windows users. Lots of business big wigs will say go RedHat based (CentOS, paid RedHat or Oracle Linux) and for some business solutions with specific business needs it is in some cases the only way to go. If you ever decide to uas a RedHat Pac

Just do it

[TimMD909]

Nike had the right idea: just do it. Pick a distribution. Use it. See if you like. If you don't, switch.

A very non-techie friend of mine installed Ubuntu 8.04 almost a decade ago and has only needed my help a couple times in that time period. Once he needed help with X config settings to hook up an old TV via HDMI. Another time it was a Comcast issue. Granted, my friend is on the high end of intelligence and he's not easily discouraged. His experience and lack of problems makes me believe Linux has been ready for the desktop for some time.