Hey, so my friend asked me which distro i can recommend for him. He basically used Windows his whole life. The recent developments of Microsoft though seems to worry him, so he want to give Linux a try.
I myself use Linux since around one year, so i’m definitely far from being an expert and i don’t really feel i have enough expertise to give him an appropriate answer. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and love it, but i suppose it’s not a good distro for him since he is not that tech affine and i suppose getting used to the terminal is a bit much too ask and could scare him away from the Linux experience.
So what im looking for is a distro, that is easy to use (for beginners & non techies; also not a rolling release) but is also good for Gaming (NVIDIA) and lightly everyday stuff. He uses his computer only for free time, not for his work.
I hope some people here have some helpful recommendations. I was thinking of maybe recommend Mint or Ubuntu, but i only used Ubuntu for a few days and don’t really know much about it.
I’m not really in the know myself, but I’ve recently seen EndeavourOS recommend over PopOS due to faster driver updates.
You can install pamac for a GUI for the package manager. Do
yay
to search for any package and install it; doyay
(nothing else) to upgrade everything, andyay -Rcns
to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAURFor the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer
Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default
The arch wiki is amazing