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In my opinion the exact distribution isn't all that relevant in the beginning. What is relevant is that it is one with decently sized community and a good amount of information floating around since easily getting answers to questions along the lines of "How do i do X?" is probably the most important aspect when learning a new system.
So basically i'd stick with the big dogs and 100% avoid anything with rolling releases. I know always having latest, greatest bleeding edge version seems cool and in a way logical (especially to former Windows users) but it is only great as long as nothing breaks. If it does trying to fix stuff (or even worse failing to do so) might put a new user in a pretty bad place or at least sour the experience due to having to spend extended amounts of time scouting the web/forums for solutions which might or might not work out given the users abilities. Even if nothing breaks things might still change unexpectedly due to newer versions, well... changing things. Also not the best experience while trying to learn something.
Mint, Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu probably make good starting points. Something a little more exotic would probably be OK too but i don't know enough about the communities/available information of those distributions to say for sure. It's not like there would be a shortage of available distributions (https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity) after all.
If data collection/privacy is a deciding factor i'd say the less integrated the distribution is the better, which would probably point towards Debian and (i guess??) Fedora. I am not much so a RPM guy so i might be wrong in regards to Fedora.
Last but certainly not least is the choice of desktop environment. I figure this would really be the most important factor as it is what a new (likely primarily or even exclusively desktop) user will be in contact with the most. Again i would advise to start off with something as non-exotic as possible. What i usually recommend to new users is XFCE since it is rather common, functional and simple but i figure KDE wouldn't be all bad either (not something i really use myself so take what i say with a grain of salt). I'd stay away from Gnome. While i like the ideas behind Mate/Cinnamon i feel they suffer a bit from being offshots of Gnome (even if i like Gnome 2).
In general i think that moving away from Windows and getting out of the desktop-evolution-for-evolutions-sake cycle (by sticking to a decidedly traditional desktop experience) make a good match. I figure i might not be entirely impartial in this regard though. I guess some users actually enjoy experimental futuristic desktop design philosophies and are productive using those (otherwise the big commercial system wouldn't be toying around all the time, right? it can't all be about brand recognition and faux improvements, right? ... right?).
The only little thing left to consider would be in my opinion if the installer (of the desired distribution) supports setting up the desired desktop environment right out of the box to avoid having to mess around with the CLI to finish (as in getting the desktop environment installed) the setup. With a bit of searching around, a little general technical literacy and/or preexisting knowledge of the system (maybe from running servers on this or a related distribution) it shouldn't be that bad otherwise but in my opinion its better to just get new users going as fast as possible. Details and such can then be picked up later on.
OK, that was my book on how to select a Linux distribution to get started with, maybe it helps someone not be overwhelmed by the 289.42 quadrillions of choices
for desktop
while not mainstream
Aurora
built on fedora core with rpm-ostree
fell in love and never went back
everything is a container even the layered os
kinda like docker container
Why just treat the symptoms when you can remove the whole cancer?
If you want a Windows-like experience, you can install (((Ubuntu Kylin))). It’s the closest in appearance to Windows, install it and you won’t regret it. It supports all languages.
Note: this version isn’t widely known globally because it’s tailored for China. It’s built by Ubuntu, so conspiracy theorists can relax
https://ubuntukylin.com/?lang=en
Fedora with GNOME if you're not a 50yo middle aged dad with 4 kids
otherwise, also Fedora but with KDE
None - for desktop CachyOS or another arch based for the AUR or just Fedora/OpenSUSE
what can 18y old use?
Me as a chair but if we talking os then Fedora with gnome
i can't sleep now
Linux Mint Cinnamon.
This is kinda true but then it also isn't. It really depends a lot on the person and their perspective but in any case the "Linux is better than Windows" claim regularly made by snobbish Linux users as if Linux was some kind of 1:1 improvement over Windows is bullshit. Linux has most of its upsides where it isn't like Windows and Windows has most of its upsides where it isn't like Linux. Making both de facto exchangeable has been kind of a wet dream for a bunch of people for decades now and while more recent results certainly aren't as crappy anymore as they were like 10-15 years ago i'd still argue that in a lot of ways they pretty much create the worst of both worlds.
Having said that, no one comes to Linux the first time and at the same time has also already used it extensively in the past. It just doesn't work this way and the people that stick around have to come from somewhere. Historically the first step with getting to have a comfortable Linux experience is to make peace with the fact that it isn't Windows and not falling into the trap of trying to make it into some kind of not-Windows-but-Windows OS. Step two is learn your environment (admittedly not as easy anymore as it was in the past and the make-it-like-Windows crowd isn't exactly blameless in this regard). The result is quite comfortable and efficient.
Windows on the other hand mostly skips the whole learn your environment part and has pretty much perfected just-click-a-bunch-of-times-and-it-will-usually-work with the downside that you are likely screwed if it doesn't and there isn't much or any flexibility but then most of the time it just works in some acceptable way. There is seriously no irony or sarcasm involved when i say that Windows is very good at this. This is what throws a lot of people off (in part simply because they are constantly being told that Linux would be some kind of SuperWindows...). It doesn't stop at slapping a fat resource wasting DE on a box and calling it a day. Actually if one isn't quite careful said fat DE might prove to be more of an obstacle than a helper.
Well, i guess Windows Vista (or really the sabotaging of 2k support - i was never really an XP user) must have been worse than data collection then
I’ve used elementaryOS as my main OS for years, but use Debian 13 (Raspberry Pi OS on my Pi 500) daily too. I used Fedora KDE on my secondary PC for several years too. Have tried Linux Mint - it’s closer to Windows than elementaryOS is.
Humanity? Nah, that would be quite illegal..
Why cinnamon over KDE in this case?
Parrot Home
Linux Kodachi
Obsolete Mint for couch surfing
Librazik for A/V
Recently tried POP! os.. bit annoying
The OP asked for a Windows replacement, and Cinnamon is the closest to the Windows look and feel.
Are KDE of XFCE really that much further away? They all seem to follow the classic desktop + taskbar approach after all.
repacement for WIN Zorin os i test it
Fedora is the It Just Works answer imo. Why?
Pick one of the Silverblue ones if you're really worried you'll accidentally break something (Silverblue is very hard to break and can easily be rolled back, although that comes at a high price). I recommend the KDE spin over the GNOME one especially if you're coming from Windows, it can be themed to look almost just like it. If you need packages from another distro, just use
distroboxor Flatpak.I like windows 10 as replacement for 11.
I personally like Debian 13 with the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE)
Deepin 25.1 Arrives With Linux Kernel 6.18 and New AI Features
https://linuxiac.com/deepin-25-1-arrives-with-linux-kernel-6-18-and-new-ai-features/
Not trying to hate on Fedora or anything (if that's someone's favorite all i can say is more power to them) but i don't think compiling with a more greedy
-march/-mtunecombination really makes that much difference across the board (on amd64 at least).Sure, there is a bunch of applications that will have healthy gains from doing so but overall i'd say if exhaustion of available opcodes is really a factor some source based distribution is probably the way to exploit that angle (which obviously comes with its own set of downsides).
I would be curious as to where the first part of this comes from. I mean, sure, it's pretty obvious that the Redhat guys will be very much clustered around Fedora but beyond that i wouldn't know how the connection is made.
I guess the fact that the Poettering crew, which largely hijacked the userland side of things, was basically sponsored by Redhat will play into this but then their achievement of persuading most large distributions still doesn't grant them some kind of official status.
Boy, oh boy. I mean, do what you need to do but it's kind of an anti-pattern, isn't it? Probably not exactly the most sound advice to give to an unsuspecting newbie.
It's not really that big of a difference, same with CachyOS & Gentoo, totally agree with you. Kernel scheduling & filesystem choice & use of
zramare the big perf wins for common desktop workloads, and Fedora does that right all out of the box, just like CachyOS.Linus Torvalds himself uses Fedora Linux with GNOME. Poettering does, and most of the Freedesktop & GNOME team does as well. Regardless of your opinions of them and how they got to their current position, they are the "Linux userland" team at this point, and they all use Fedora. Also, Red Hat is still a big deal in corporate, and that has important downstream effects for Fedora being supported by proprietary software. I have dealt with far more RHEL systems in production than Fedora, although that's obviously anecdotal.
Newbies coming from Windows are usually scared of or incapable of compiling software, and I'd be afraid to recommend something like the AUR to new users for fear of running into actual malware or breaking their system in interesting ways.
distroboxmakes it easy for new users to go "ok, I want this package from Arch, let me enter my distrobox and run it from there" and lets them quickly delete the container if they mess something up. If you're picking distros purely by how many packages there are in them, you'd use Bedrock Linux or NixOS or Arch (with AUR) instead, but all of those are way too complex for newbies.f+k u budi
Well, i'd argue Torvalds hardly counts a userland guy
As for the other's: I personally would rather call them team corporate than the Linux userland. I guess it's all very subjective to a point. I'm obviously quite well aware of what these people (again excluding Torvalds, who might have his opinions - he always does after all - but doesn't really belong there) would like to be but then it's also kind of a self proclaimed title, which depending on where you look yields either more or less acceptance.
Sure, i'd never question Redhat's importance to the enterprise sector and i (like most people holding opinions similar to mine i'd guess) have exactly zero problems with that. It's the point where Redhat tries to make Linux synonymous with the enterprise sector where the problems start for a lot of people. In a way they have certainly won this war (or at the very least some decisive battle) during the historic Debian vote (it's kinda pointless to rehash the details but without that systemd would likely have stayed a niche system like all the other upstarts, launchds and whatnot - no, i doubt anyone with half a brain would argue SysV to be great or anything but the whole thing was a solved problem long before Poettering came along) but that doesn't mean that the outcome will be universally accepted. Well, at least until the remaining holdouts find/build ecosystems where the grass is still greener.
I very much agree that idea of user repositories (be it AUR, launchpad, ...) is a horrible one when paired with non-technical or simply inexperienced users. I don't think that handing them a tool archiving kind of the same thing in a dirtier way is much of an upgrade just because it poses less risk of foot shooting though.
The idea of curated software libraries is very deeply ingrained in the unixoid landscape and it's one of its beauties. The big distribution's repositories contain more than enough software as far as every day tasks are concerned and having to fall back on some kind of non-official source should be a very rare exception.
Of course pretty much everyone arriving from Windows will ask the big "But why can't i just download/run setup.exe?" question at some point. The answer isn't to tell them that there is a tool behaving pretty much like setup.exe though but rather that Linux doesn't have setup.exe and if that's what they want to use they might be better off with just staying with Windows. There's certainly a bunch of edge cases where Flatpak and friends will shine but teaching new users bad habits (not even just because of some kind of purist ideology but rather since i strongly believe that it will harm their experience in the mid to long term) isn't one of those in my opinion.
I really don't get this whole conversion/convenience at any cost angle. Like i've said in some post above Linux and Windows have their major advantages in the places where they differ from each other. Trying to make them exchangeable will by definition lose a good bit of those.
LTSC?
Well, maybe? This being LET my money would rather be on YOLO though.
I first converted to Slackware in 2016 as my Windows replacement - honestly because someone told me it would be a "fun" learning experience. It was ... unique! I'm currently trying Zorin OS out - so far so good.
Haha. Well, at least they didn't tell you that LFS was "fun" (it obviously is but...). Glad to see that you seem to have a sense of humor and that it worked out for you in the end