"SO proof" distro
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Any of the ostree variants of Fedora, be they Fedora Official or downstream ones like the Universal Blue family
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Aurora is not a rolling release. It's part of Universal Blue, based on Fedora Silverblue.
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I'd rather recommend Manjaro to those who want to start out simple, but then get into the details of Linux.
Unless all you do is browsing, Manjaro starts easy but then has a steep curve because it's still Arch, with the added issue of practically every Manjaro newbie ignoring warnings about AUR.
It will require you to work with the terminal, troubleshoot, and get to understand your system. This is not bad - that's how I got into Linux and never looked back after all - but this is not a bulletproof "SO distro".
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That is, if you have experience running immutable distros yourself and are able to serve as a tech support for them should they ever need it.
A lot is different under the hood, and general Linux knowledge doesn't always help.
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Now that's an extreme choice
Doing a lot of tech support, don't you?
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Or Kinoite, for a more familiar experience
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In fairness, there are attempts to make Nix user-friendly, such as SnowflakeOS, featuring a lot of improvements including a graphical app store etc, but those are alpha and not ready for an average user.
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If she wants a familiar experience and ease of switching, why not consider KDE or Cinnamon? Both are officially available within Debian.
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Depends on the use case. For example, I actually managed to bork Aurora to the unbootable state while trying to make a VPN work properly in a matter of two hours.
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For me, Mint borked the network after an update. I never got to figure what was wrong - the local network worked, the Internet connection was there and other devices worked through the same router, remote IPs were unreachable so it's not a DNS problem, etc.
But I might have had an edge case.
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Okay, let's call it a semi-rolling release. Having breaking changes every 6 months is still very often for a set-and-forget system.
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I've installed popOS to a couple of relatives, haven't had anty issues for a year so far. Can definately recommend!
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Linux mint makes sense. Auto updates and its hastle free for non techy person like me.
Even if I'm doing something crazy , chatgpt to the rescue.
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Semi-serious suggestion: Guix or NixOS. They're not break-safe per se, but if they do break something, you can use the OS' previous generations to go back to an operational state. Just... don't let them use the commands that delete older generations.
(Semi-serious because they're both not exactly mainstream and not eactly conventional in their setup.)
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Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, "turn it off and then on again" will almost always work to fix the OS.
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Fedora Silverblue.
Or really any immutable OS; they would have to go way out of their way to even edit system files, much less break the system. I just recommend Silverblue because gnome is really hard for an inexperienced user to break.
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Nope! Everything just works and it's rock solid. It's also been my daily driver for over 20 years.
I was doing a lot of tech support when my wife was on endeavouros and my daughter was on bazzite. Tbf, my problems with bazzite were probably down to me not understanding the immutable distro concept.
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I can absolutely expect Slackware to be solid; my concern is about user-friendliness
Not the easiest distro out there.
I more or less understood immutable distros and kind of managed to work fine with them, but, honestly, I feel all they do is enforce a certain way to interact with the system that makes screwing it up very hard - but on the other hand, introduces a slew of non-standard and sometimes complicated solutions newbies won't understand (even for veterans it takes a while to get a grasp on them). If you follow the same pipeline on a mutable distro, you get the same stability plus the ability to do a lot of things without jumping through the hoops.
Right now I ended up on classical non-atomic Fedora for this reason. It features a lot of safe practices from immutable distros - system snapshots before updating, prioritizing flatpaks, container-oriented terminal able to work with Distrobox among all other things - but at the same time it's a mutable distro able to work with everything else.
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I think Slackware's reputation for being difficult dates back to the 90s when all linux was difficult. Slackware has evolved just like everyone else, just differently. It's easy to install, and works like any other kde plasma based distro if you choose the default full install.
The two biggest differences are no systemd and package management. Slackpkg functions somewhat like apt-get, but only for official packages and updates. Everything else can be installed with slackbuild scripts that can be automated with sbopkg. This process is similar to using the AUR with a helper like yay. And I have some flatpaks installed too.
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Fair!
But still, an installation process that doesn't involve a package manager is a bit of a pain, comparatively. Flatpaks may certainly be very helpful, though.
