Couldn’t find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it’s ok to ask here.
A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend’s kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can’t play Factorio.
For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can’t easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don’t spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn’t seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.
- Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
- Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
- Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn’t need to be “kid proof”, I don’t think he touches any stuff he doesn’t know what it does.
Try an immutable os like Bazzite.
Pop!_OS might also be an option.
I’d hold off on Pop! OS for the moment, until they have Cosmic into an updated release.
I say this as a relatively happy user of Pop
I’ve said this many times, and will continue saying this again and again:
When in doubt: Linux Mint will provide everything you’ll need. You can distrohop once you understand the basics, customizations and optimizations can come later.
That hardware is very powerful, so Linux Mint (maybe Debian Edition) will do the trick.
I have a kid about that age interested in games. There was definitely interest in social pressure to switch to Windows for gaming for the bigger selection and what friends were playing.
deleted by creator
I’m using Fedora KDE on my own PC, and it has been soft-bricked by updates multiple times, or by doing seemingly trivial things like choosing a theme from the built-in store. Seems quite unstable to me so it’s not something I would recommend to someone without the ability to repair their OS from a terminal.
I love Nobara, but it regularly breaks between updates (though everything is usually fixed within 3 hours).
Kubuntu, the best of the two worlds: all Ubuntu repos + KDE (sweet DE for kids)
24.10 for better Wayland support.
Appimages for software, then winegui could be enough for gaming
Timekpr-next for screen-time management
deleted by creator
Majority of AAA games run invasive software like kernel-level anticheat, I’d personally recommend js buying him a PS5 or running them in VMs (Linux or windows).
Windows lmao
Sounds like SteamOS might work? https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/
This is the old SteamOS from over a decade ago and isn’t usable anymore. The modern SteamOS from the Steam Deck isn’t available yet for desktops.
fyi you can use the deck restore image on an amd build, although probably there will be complications
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1b71-edf2-eb6d-2bb3#reimage
afaik chimeraos is the recommended alternative, which is a fork of the current steamos, with more supported hw (but not nvidia)
Do you know how mature it is as a desktop OS? I saw the official FAQ does recommend against using it as such. I tried it on a HTPC a few years ago but at that point it didn’t seem very usable outside of Steam’s full screen UI.
There was some news about an updated one coming out soon for desktop. There was someone though on reddit that had put it on a pc, but of course still had some issues.
