Mint and no shit.

The amount of people who spend thousands of dollars on MacBooks to just open up Safari makes me want to believe the average person could just have a ThinkPad with Mint or regular Ubuntu and be just fine. But the reality is if you run into a solvable issue on Windows or a MacBook, usually the degrees of separation from someone (friend or family member) who can solve that issue is much, much, much lower. I just seriously doubt most people can conduct the bare minimum of troubleshooting to be able to even search the internet for easy solutions. Can people learn? Absolutely! Are they going to go through the trouble? Probably not.

But who knows, as personal computing becomes more expensive and system requirements stop people from updating. Maybe more people look to Linux as an alternative and perhaps we’ll reach a critical mass where my previous statement doesn’t matter.

Fedora, now it’s shockingly easy to use.

I silently replaced windows in the home PC and it took 2 months for the tech illiterate SO to say “WTF, why you put Apple on this PC, I thought you hated them” (put same username/password, same wallpaper, even Microsoft Edge)

At work I was shocked that I could login directly as user@windows.domain without any extra configuration. Plain vanilla fresh install, typed my active directory account for laughs, it worked 😲

Also at work I was shocked to see that I could just run the exe of the windows-only accounting software and everything works. I even installed LibreOffice in wine, lol (the accounting software needs soffice.exe for generating spreadsheets). I could even install foxit reader for windows 😂 (sorry, all the Linux PDF readers completely suck when printing, I need previews and booklet and all the extra features)

Linux mint

i just erased windows 11 and replaced it with Linux Mint Cinnamon- not easy for me as I haven’t used anything but apple ecosystem since forever, but I’m extremely happy with it, and the upgrade in privacy is worth it to me even if it weren’t an excellent OS, which it definitely is. you just have to be willing to learn new things

Whole lotta MacOS recommendations here, so I’m gonna say:

Bazzite.

… you can actually play games on it, and its an OS too!

More technically:

Its a Linux distro, an atomic version of Fedora, with many tweaks and pre built in utilities to make gaming work better and more easily.

If you have no idea what that means, it means that its fairly cutting edge but also very stable version of linux, where the core OS yells at you if you try to muck with it, and highly encourages you to use the various sandboxed containers it helps you use you run all sorts of applications.

The simple version of the above is: Just use the app store, Bazaar, and things will pretty much ‘just work’.

You can do more intense / power user / expert type stuff if you like, and it does take a few extra steps compared to just like, straight Fedora or Debian, but, Bazzite is much, much more noob friendly and much harder to break.

If you are mainly gaming, Bazzite. For everything else, Fedora.

TempleOS

Windows is the most common, and most people are more accustomed to that OS.

MacOS if they can afford it. Otherwise Linux Mint.

Linux. Hands down. Always.

New user? Try Kubuntu Linux

Power user? Eh, you can try anything but I’m still with Kubuntu because Ubuntu with KDE just works so damned nice

Nice post to stir some shit, OP. 🍿

An immutable Linux system. Especially if there a total noon.

If they won’t be doing any modern gaming (like 2025/6 new releases), then Linux Mint.

If they want to do modern gaming, I highly recommend Fedora (KDE Spin for most, GNOME if you really like Mac’s UX).

If you want to do mostly gaming only (not heavy work, dedicated gaming setup), then Bazzite which is a downstream of Fedora.

Mint is a bit easier for a new user, but Fedora arguably gives you the latest Linux has to offer at excellent stability. They also have some nice defaults like BTRFS, zswap, SElinux that you don’t have to worry about configuring manually in any way.

EDIT:

I should add that you probably shouldn’t listen to the average random youtube video on this topic, because a metric ton of them fail to highlight the issues of many distros, desktop environments, software, etc because they provide a dumb tier list based off of their personal interests or something that they read from each distro’s description without actually taking the time to thoroughly test.

ZorinOS is not a real answer just because they advertise parity with Windows. There are plenty of distros that achieve the same thing, better, and for free.

The best thing about linux is that you can try it out first without installing. Really play around with it and make sure it suits what you want.

Whatever Linux is being sold pre-installed on a machine within their budget.

Told my dad to buy a Dell laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled after his last Windows laptop died. He’s been fine with that for the last 5 years.