"SO proof" distro
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22? Oddly specific list?
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I’m gonna be the boring guy.
RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)
Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.
Benefits:
- Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
- Actually works
- Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
- If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
- Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.
Drawbacks:
- Boring (for you)
- Not ideal for gaming
If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.
Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.
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They have significant documentation, and anything not covered here is just part of Fedora atomic:
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That is a different spin than the original comment, which is why I made that commen.
https://docs.getaurora.dev/ https://docs.projectbluefin.io/ aurora has one small page of documentation total. Bluefin has even less. I consider this near-zero documentation. So how would OP's non-techy girlfriend (or someone who has only heard of aurora and bluefin from this thread) know to go to bazzite, a completely different project to most people, to debug their completely different OS? Because googling "ublue aurora flatpak won't install" literally gives this page: https://docs.getaurora.dev/guides/software/ which is literally almost useless.
Bazzite's documentation has gotten way better since I installed it (they had almost nothing on rpmostree commands when I did), but I don't believe everything in the documentation for bazzite applies the same to aurora and bluefin, especially with differences in pre-installed non-layered gaming defaults vs working with flatpaks will be not even close to the same.
Also fedora knoite has little documentation https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-kinoite/. It has enough to get you started and installed, but that is about it. It has one single line of code about
rpmostreefor example, not even anything about installing an RPM not in fedora's limited repos. -
Nixos with whatever defaults you don’t want her touching, then she can use nix profiles to install extra software if she wants
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I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad's laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I'd set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)
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BLUEFIN.
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I suggested 0patch not to bypass some arbitrary check, for which there are many options, but to provide access to security patches and updates after Microsoft stops publishing them for 10.
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Bluefin has even less. I consider this near-zero documentation.
What do you feel is missing from the documentation, can you be specific? You're examples are too generalized to be actionable.
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Yeah wouldn’t it be nice…
But the most considerate thing for the user is to help them use what they want to use. There’s also a real benefit to keeping ahold of that windows because people often have their own ways of doing things and it may be more expedient to boot back into 10 than to figure out how to complete some task in Linux.
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Has "non techy" evaded you ?
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If you're not going to give her sudo access then I'd say it'll be really hard maybe even impossible to screw up. Also maybe setup a from job that'll do auto updates and if needed add in a check to make sure it isn't uninstalling anything. Also how about immutable distro.
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eh, gnome is about the same.
i always wait for at least the .1 or .2
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Haven't used GNOME for a while, but I guess that's a problem of open source projects in general. Though GNOME at least has Red Hat behind it.
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In the era of Flatpak, I kind of agree with you.
The primary drawback is the complete lack of packages. A home user is going to want something not included and then things fall apart. Flatpaks and Distrobox have made that a lot better.
If you could get away with a RHEL core and Flatpak for apps, you would have a pretty solid setup for a “normal” person.
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You can install imperatively using nice profiles. So you the OP can set up the base distro in a way their SO can’t break. Then any extra software can be installed imperatively using nix profiles. Any installed software will work as normals. Checking the normal places for configurations if their SO even needs to go that far
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I've got my wife and 5 year old on slackware. They wouldn't know how to screw it up if they wanted to!
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Any immutable distro would do I guess
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Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like mint or gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don't know what you're doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you go -
I prefer Manjaro, super easy.
