https://www.kali.org/docs/introduction/should-i-use-kali-linux/

"Kali is a Linux distribution specifically geared towards professional penetration testers and security specialists, and given its unique nature, it is NOT a recommended distribution if you’re unfamiliar with Linux or are looking for a general-purpose Linux desktop distribution"

Kali is a pentest distro... it is NOT a daily use distro. You're new to Linux... do not keep Kali on your short list... please. Go with a mainstream distro like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, openSUSE, Mint, etc

Try Fedora Workstation:

• It's RedHat without the paid support
• RedHat is driving the direction of Linux
• GNOME3 is MacOS-ish in appearance
• SystemD is taking over everything, if you don't have any hangups over systemd, might as well jump in with both feet
• Built in Docker support (docker, moby, whatever the hell it's calling itself now)
• Wayland display manager, which is the direction X11 is headed, RedHat is leading the field on this too

If you're learning Linux for work, RedHat is the way to go, and Fedora is the testbed for RedHat, so just install Fedora. There's a huge community to help when you get stuck but, honestly, desktop linux is so point-and-click nowadays, you're probably not going to have that many problems.

Since you already have Experience using Mint, just stick with it. It makes installing the Nvidia driver easy and has all the packages of the debian ecosystem, and the enhanced compatibility of Ubuntu (minus the snap package nonsense).

As a MS-Office replacement I would suggest OnlyOffice (or the web version of MS-Office, if that is your thing).

The Cinnamon desktop looks a bit dated out of the box, but that can be remedied here. On the bright side, Cinnamon is rock stable and will never randomly break by itself or its extensions.

Steam works best as a flatpak in my experience, Origin and Uplay might not work at all (maybe someone else knows).

Since you're new to Linux and you have an NVIDIA GPU, I would really recommend Pop!_OS. Most things work out of the box, but make sure to grab the NVIDIA ISO. If you are willing to tinker though, I would recommend looking into a Win. 10 virtual machine with a PCI pass through. Be aware, getting a Windows virtual machine with a NVIDIA GPU is a little bit of a hassle.

Slackware is not a very good first distro. What I suggest to look at are the following:

• Linux Mint is good because it has a windows-like interface. It is Ubuntu-based, so application support is good. Great installation and easy updates.

• Pop!_OS Also based on Ubuntu, but the interface looks more like a Mac. Easy installation and it has a good driver manager.

I suggest following a video tutorial for getting the ISO and making a bootable USB stick, if you are new to installing operating systems.

Ubuntu and its various flavours tend to be the easiest distros to start with.

A word of warning though, while Gimp and Inkscape are great programs, it can be very difficult to adapt to them if you are accustomed Adobe's offerings. You may want to start by installing both on windows and trying them out for a while before switching.

Dual boots with Windows are less reliable than Windows.

Windows has a nasty (arguably, anti-competititive) habit of ignoring the fact that other operating systems exist and clobbering the bootloader during its updates. Not only does this not solve the reliability problem, it will actually make it worse because those updates have a high chance of hosing Linux, too.

My suggestion if she still needs Windows apps for work or entertainment would be to run a full Linux distro on the hardware, and run a virtual machine for Windows.

All consumer-grade hardware since the Intel Core 2 Duo days supports virtualization, so performance is very good. Virtualization on Linux also supports USB and PCI passthrough out of the box, so working with external devices like mixers and GPUs for rendering both work well using this method.

My recommendation for her would be ElementaryOS. Don't let the price tag thing at the bottom bother you, it's a pay-what-you-want model, and entering $0 in the 'custom' box is fine.

Elementary is based on Ubuntu, which is widely supported in the Linux world, and you'll find that a lot of applications support Ubuntu. It's also got a predictable and infrequent major update cycle, though it does constantly get security updates that squash bugs without changing all of the software versions that she'll be using.

As to Android emulation, Anbox might be helpful, though if the game is 3D intensive, that might not offer the best performance. It's possible to run an ARM-based virtual machine, or Android x86 as well.

I have fallen in love with EndeavourOS. It’s an everything works distributed built on Arch. And it’s pretty awesome, proton, steam and Wine just work out of the box and you can roll your own Virtual Machine system using base libraries or just install Virtual Box. I have pushed and pulled the system, added and removed packages, and have had a very stable and reliable system, with only one minor glitch on some big updates that were causing me some minor issues, but got patched in the next 4 hour window, and next update fixed it all up. Very happy, large community and full Arch and AUR repo compatibility included. Maybe check it out? EndeavourOS

QUBEs OS is the only one I know of that comes packaged in a "easy" to use baremetal hypervisor OS. (It uses Xen as the baselayer) It has some very specific hardware requirements related to I/O virtualization that you need to know when installing.

https://www.qubes-os.org/

If you have any questions, send me a message, I use it as a daily driver work laptop.

I understand that you like it how easy it is to use Windows Apps on Zorin, but you should remember that it's still an simulation and you should use applications for your platform if possible.

Check out Alternativeto and use the Linux filter to find alternative software you would use on Windows.

Linux is awesome, Linux is an Open Source community, so try to use Open Source software.

Take a look at MX Linux, it's designed to run on a USB stick if you want it to and has a lot of useful tools with a simple interface. You might like it.

https://mxlinux.org/

Elementary OS

Their interfaces are polished and simple, and they're on a stable base which should keep your tech support requests to a minimum.

The developers are also aiming to improve accessibility features over time, taking an "accessibility is for everyone" approach. That's an aspect that gets neglected in many distros, quite honestly.

The minimal window managers you're referencing usually require quite a bit of configuration to get right. They're aiming to be flexible and for you to design your optimal workflow, rather than general appeal.

That said, check out Manjaro i3 Edition from their community releases.

It's a good starting point to get into tiling or minimalist window managers, and there are tons of usable configs on Unixporn that can be adapted to get your own system just right.

Your best bet will probably just be Debian, but Linux Mint Debian Edition might be a good place to start. As far as I have been able to tell, the only thing that is much more difficult between Debian and Ubuntu installs is some common low-end Broadcom wireless cards are difficult to configure, even on the ISO's that include non-free firmware. Usually installing the package broadcom-wl fixes it, but it will require you to establish a network connection some other way or bring the package and it's dependencies over on a storage device.

> kali

Kali is not a daily driver or a programming ready OS, Even they say it clearly. Its even targeted for either portable usage or for virtual machines mostly.

I think Void Linux will run Intel-based Apple hardware. For earlier PowerPC hardware Void Linx PowerPC packages GNOME too. Void will keep your kernel more recent and more flexibly changed between kernel versions and series than other distros, an important consideration in the context of hardware support.

From your specs I would choose either KDE neon or Xubuntu as these use the least amount of RAM and are really good OSs overall. Also, both are really geared towards new users, so there is that. Please note though that, in my personal opinion, the XFCE desktop environment is not the prettiest looking out of the box and needs some tweaking in order for it to look good. KDE on the other hand looks somewhat similar to Windows out of the box and is really easy to understand the whole UI.

I'll plug the distro I'm currently using: openSUSE Tumbleweed. It uses a rolling release model like Arch but takes a slightly more conservative approach. Package updates are still pushed out quickly but they are much more willing to hold packages back if they are likely to cause breakage. The one disadvantage can be package availability. They are strict about not including any patent-encumbered software, so video codecs like x264 will need to be acquired from a third-party repo like Packman. It's also not as popular as something like Ubuntu so less common packages may not be in the repositories. The openSUSE Build Service makes it easy to build your own packages if you're comfortable with spec files.

Another option is Manjaro but it will lag a little behind Arch and Tumbleweed. I've read concerns around their security policy but I honestly don't know enough to say if they are valid. Basically though, the Manjaro repos lag about a week or two behind Arch which gives it a bit more stability. It's Arch at its core though and still uses pacman for package management. You can use the AUR as well which helps to supplement package availability.

Getting the drivers is not hard, and you only need proprietary drivers for Nvidia graphics cards, all other drivers are baked into the Linux kernel (apart from a few wi-fi cards for some laptops, but this is very rare). Nvidia drivers can be buggy sometimes, but it's actually mostly okay those days. Pop!_OS has them preinstalled, Ubuntu and Linux Mint allow you to install them from the "Additional drivers" helper. It's a one-click install.

​

>how hard/possible is it to play steam games?

Valve is pushing hard for gaming on Linux. Their upcoming Steam Deck is running Linux. Steam integrates Proton, a compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux. Most games will work, some may require a few tweaks. Most games that don't work nowadays are because of anti-cheat. You can check how your games work on ProtonDB. Valve is working on solving the anti-cheat issue, and it should be working by December this year, for the launch of the Steam Deck. They also advertised 100% compatibility with the Steam catalogue on the Steam Deck (in other words, 100% of the Steam catalogue working on Linux). This is obviously marketing promises that should be taken with a grain of salt, but considering the insane improvements Proton has seen in its short life (3 years ago), it's not that far-fetched.

​

>I’ve always heard Linux isn’t very gaming friendly.

The time when getting a game to run was tedious is long gone. It's sometimes a bit less plug-and-play than Windows, and not all games work, but gaming on Linux is getting better by the day. Use Lutris to install non-Steam games without having to do any configuration yourself.

Also, check out r/linux_gaming, it's a nice sub.

https://lutris.net/games/league-of-legends/

Might take a look at Solus Plasma. Very easy to set up for gaming. Everything you need is either pre-installed or 1 click in the software center. No need for hunting for commands to cut & paste in the terminal and hoping it works.

Most popular distros out there have an option to a minimal install. You can use Ubuntu mini.iso to have a good nvidia support and choose to don't install GUI, then you can install wine and nvidia drivers manually later. Or you can go with debian netinst if you think Ubuntu will install bloat anyway although I can garant you it will not. You can just install Arch as it is pretty minimal and then install wine and nvidia drivers since its wiki is really helpful on how to do so. You can install gentoo and emerge every software choosing by hand... etc, etc, etc.

Try either Kali or parrotOS

Kali: It's debian based, its stable and has a lot of industry support, so its usually recommended for all cyber sec people, whether new or old. It's documentation and stuff is also really well written and there are like gorillions of tutorials for kali.

The full install does come with a lot of tools that a beginner might not need tho. so you could call it a little "bloated".

Although you can also do a plain core install and then install some tool sets that you require.Check this out please.

​

ParrotOS: It's debian based as well, so kali and parrot are really similar, and you can even use most kali linux tutorials and apply them on parrot as well.

Parrot is a little newer and the best part about it is that it is really light weight, and some parts of it are more secure than kali.

you will also be able to get the same tools are kali on parrotOS.

​

Black-arch: honestly I have never used it, so I cant say anything about it.

​

Any other distro:

you can also do a fuck all and go with any other distro and start collecting/learning about the tools you need along the way.

It's a really good way of learning IMO but a little less convenient than having all the tools readily available.

The good thing about these net sec oriented OS is that they come pre loaded with a ton of tools making it convenient, especially when you just want to boot up into a live environment (with a USB stick) and get working ASAP.

​

TLDR: use kali / parrotOS if you are very new (since you will find a lotta support/tutorials). Or just take any OS (I recommend Manjaro) and start building your tool collection, and use linux as a daily driver (will teach you more than any amount of theory could do)

I've personally had hit-or-miss experiences upgrading Ubuntu installs to newer versions. I generally just re-install now.

Since you want to stick with Cinnamon but don't want to re-install the OS, I'd recommend taking a look at the Fedora Cinnamon spin, or GeckoLinux Rolling Cinnamon Edition.

Learning Linux and learning to work with Linux servers in the cloud with containerized applications are mutually exclusive objectives.

That being said, any aspiring Linux user interested in cloud publishing will want to quaint themselves with CoreOS

I'd personally reccomend MX Linux as it's got the lightweight Xfce and a wide range of tools available. The only trouble you may have is with the 32 bit, if the P4 is a newer one it's 64, but if it's not. You may have issues.

I liked elementary OS when I first switched because of how amazing Pantheon (its Desktop Environment) is but it has a lot of bugs that frequently annoy me so yeah I think Pop_OS! is a better choice but I haven't actually used it yet. Let me know what you think if you can.

You should be able to use any distro for your needs.

I personally use Manjaro, which is an arch-based distro. And I love it.

I also personally like using Manjaro Architect as my distro installer to be able to customize my installation.

You could do with any of the top ten OSes on Distrowatch excluding Solus on Elementary. My personal preference is openSUSE, (Leap, in your case, because of the nVIDIA hardware) but Debian and Fedora will probably suit you just as well.

For Raspberry Pi, you'll want to compile the kernel (and everything, really) for ARM rather than x86_64. Older PCs running 32bit Intel or ATI chips will need software compiled for x86.

LFS

One thing to note: Compiling a kernel on a raspberry pi will take forever. A large part of the LFS time-requirement is just sitting and waiting for code to get turned into ones and zeroes, and that's true even with a high powered, multi core CPU. A dinky lil ARM chip on a Pi might take literally a day to finish You might want to cross-compile everything on a bigger box and use a VM to test, then use the usual r-pi install method to load it up on the actual device.

My recommendation is Korora Linux. It's a modified version of Fedora with multimedia codecs and some commonly used third party repos enabled by default.

Fedora has a solid reputation as being powerful for developers and system administrators, and the additional repos give you access to Steam and Spotify with a single install command. Wine support is some of the best I've seen, due to how well it's packaged. It's a good, all-around distro for CS students and professionals who also use their systems as entertainment and casual use boxes.

I personally prefer the Gnome interface, but it's available in a variety of desktop environments so you can pick the one you like best. All versions have a similar, attractive theme.

The only downside to Korora is that it's a small project, but it's still active. It remains compatible with Fedora so even if the developers get bored, you still have an upgrade path. Any tutorial written for Fedora applies to Korora, and Fedora has some pretty solid documentation.

It’s not Linux-based, but Hiren’s BootCD PE will probably do what you want. It’s a bootable Windows 10 PE environment with lots of diagnostic tools built in. It’s free.

I’d bring a MemTest86 disc to check the RAM with. Fast & free.

>I know KDE environment will not work and I am better off with XFCE

Actually, KDE should work. A lot of people is not aware of it, but KDE is actually a lightweight desktop nowadays.

>which distro is good for everyday usage?

Solus (Either Solus KDE or Solus MATE). It is fast, stable, and super easy to use.

If you liked the idea of Arch, you could try Manjaro, a distro based on Arch designed to be an easier to set up and use alternative. They have a version developed by the community that has i3-gaps already set up for you here.

Debian is the better option for stability, but I've found Manjaro to be impressively stable overall.

what's dark mode ? do u mean like dark mode/themes in the editor (but then i guess it's an Android Studio feature, not distro one) or something like flux to work at night without losing sight and fucking your brain ?

This are some user friendly distros: Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS and Zorin.

I can personally really recommend Zorin - Clean UI - Different styles - Ubuntu based - Gnome Environment

You have LibreOffice pre installed if you don't choose the light installation (can open MS Office files) or use OpenOffice.

Maybe Office will work with Wine but I would recommend to use as much software for your platform as possible.

You can find good Alternatives for popular Software on Alternativeto Just use the Linux filter and Open Source is allways a good thing (except nobody works on this project anymore)

Ubuntu MATE and Linux Mint both come in MATE versions. I would recommend Ubuntu MATE as it gives you a nice walkthrough of the system

https://lutris.net/

https://lutris.net/downloads/

Lutris installs and runs windows games on Linux machines. It basically does all the hard parts of using wine for you.

You can run Spotify in flatpak or docker form. If Artix looks good to you, try it.

You've already gotten a lot of good suggestions, I'd also recommend CrunchBang++. It's based on Debian stable and uses the OpenBox window manager rather than a full desktop environment. It shouldn't require much tweaking at all, and I found it to be a solid choice on even lower-end hardware.

> Really you would need to upgrade the ram in order to use it on the internet.

I have to agree with this as well.

I can suggest a dozen lightweight distros, but the minute you launch Chromium or Firefox, you're going to negate all of the benefits of minimalism. Firefox currently takes 3x more memory (running 4 tabs) than Gnome Shell which is arguably one of the heaviest destkop environments there is right now.

The modern web requires modern hardware.

This bothers me greatly, but it is what it is. :(

That said, my suggestion would be Crunchbang++. It's based on Debian Stable and uses Openbox as the default window manager. It's a good starting point for tweaking a minimal system if you're not comfortable starting with a base install and adding things in.

The non-systemd init is the hardest requirement to meet because systemd is everywhere. However, my recommendation is Void Linux, it uses the runit init system and it has a ports-like system that allows you to build packages from source in addition to its standard package manager. I've been using it on my laptop for a couple weeks now and experimenting with it on VMs for a while before that, it's honestly a pretty nice setup.

If you want USB persistence, ie you want to run the OS off the USB stick and save all your data to it between sessions, MX and AntiX are among the best.

https://antixlinux.com/the-most-extensive-live-usb-on-the-planet/

• Tiny Core
• Damnsmall

Damnsmall hasn't been updated in a while, but it was current when that gear was still in common use. It'll probably work fine.

Tiny Core is more current, but it should still work.

I hate to say it, but you'd probably benefit from a Gentoo install. You'd have to customize it for him. It'd be a lot of work, but it'd run pretty well.

All that said, any modern web browser is probably going to be uncomfortable on that rig with more than one tab open or on a javascript-heavy website.

Best of luck. If you have any success, I'd love to read a follow-up.

Lighter desktop environments are definitely the way to go, cpu power would be your bottleneck so minimal processes and fluff would free more power to devote to your tasks. BunsenLabs is the spiritual successor to Crunchbang, a very minimal distro with stable (Debian Jessie) software. Almost all the configuration is done in .conf files so people have make some very modern and impressive eye candy desktops on it while barely adding any overhead.

Not really. He dissapeared from the internet. Nobody knows where he is, but everybody is hoping that he's alright. The lead members have been working on securing the login/pass for github, irc and the webpage, which has been somewhat succesfull. There is still a lot of activity and it's not even close to dying :)

You can read more about the matter here

With something that old and compatible with everything, why not broaden your horizons and install this BSD?

Failing that, Slackware is calling.

with nixos, rolling back is as easy as rebooting and selecting a previous generation in grub.
Until you garbage-collect a generation, you are able to boot it whenever you want, regardless of the changes you may have made to newer generations.

Thanks for the suggestion! I was just reading this: https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html and I couldn't understand much but from what I can understand means that you always have a "backup" if things go wrong. My concern is: is it intuitive to use for someone who doesn't know so much about Linux? Seems a bit complicated to me.

Try EndeavourOS. It's Arch based, and fully customizable. When you install it, you can choose the option for Online Installer. It will ask you what kind of DE (Desktop Environment) you want. I really like it, and the community is great. Take a look at https://endeavouros.com/

MX has backports as well, did you check those out? Also a new version is coming out soon - MX 21 RC1 has been out for a few days.

Otherwise, Void, Alpine and Artix are all lightweight - Artix probably has the largest selection of packages as it's based on Arch.

I would recommend MX Linux. It comes with mx-snapshot, a pretty straightforward tool to make bootable isos, and uses XFCE4 as the user interface so it should be somewhat user-friendly and easy to get used to. :)

MX Linux

It's based on Debian, which has a reputation for reliability and flexibility. It's "midweight", which aims to be light on resources, but not so like that it feels old or stale.

Power management is handled by the Linux kernel itself. You won't really find anything with a huge difference on that regard.

However, some distros don't ship TLP by default, and it can be a big help for extending battery life. It's available in nearly every distro's repos, if it's not enabled by default.

My suggestion, not yet mentioned here, would be MX Linux. It's a relative newcomer, but it's from the folks of the MEPIS and antiX community. It's also based on Debian, which means your familiarity with Ubuntu will be a big help, but you're not inside the Ubuntu ecosystem, which is a beneficial thing for some people.

It calls itself a "midweight" distro. They focus on minimalism, but don't do so at the expense of feeling modern and fresh.

Manjaro's package manager is Pacman, and it works similarly to Apt on Ubuntu: you type

sudo pacman

and then any arguments you want to add. For installing a package you use -S (for 'Sync') and then the package name. For updating your system, you use -Syu (y for 'refresh', u for 'upgrade'). For removing a package, you use -R (for 'Remove')

Once you commit your most-used commands to muscle memory, you'll never have to look them up again (but until that time, the Arch Wiki is your best friend). This video helped me a lot with getting started with Pacman.

Both Kubuntu and Zorin are based on Ubuntu (so yeah, It can be said both are pure ubuntu with certain packages pre-installed and customizations), and both are extremely user friendly, so things like:

• Looking good OOTB
• Well integrated and finished
• Flatpak support

Apply to both distros. Now, let me correct some things:

>+Rolling release?

Neither Kubuntu nor Zorin OS are rolling release operating systems.

>-Not good looking OOTB

Kubuntu looks pretty much like Zorin by default (i.e similar colour scheme, similar layouts, similar menu, same desktop effects, etc), so I don't think is correct to say Kubuntu is not a good-looking distro out of the box.

>-Might lack GUIs and necessary tools due its simplicity (correct me if I'm wrong)

Not correct. KDE is one of the most veteran DEs out there (it's older than Gnome itself), and it is well known to be feature-rich and user-friendly. If you check KDE's control panel you'll see it has a GUI for basically everything, at the same level as Gnome.

Now, I would recommend you to check Solus KDE. It has to be one of the best implementations of KDE out there.

If I were you I would take a look at POP_OS! It seems to be what you are looking for.

Plain text link - https://pop.system76.com/

>A modern feel

It uses the GNOME desktop environment out of the box and is pretty seamless and very easy to use.

>Hardware support

it supports Nvidia drivers in fact you can download an ISO with them already ready to go.

>As stable as Windows

It's based of Ubuntu which it's self is based of Debian (the grandfather of most distributions) so there's lots of documentation behind it and it is very stable as well. I've used it in the past and it was a pretty great time. People seem to really really enjoy it.

>Media playback

You should be able to find everything you need in the POP shop (similar to the windows store) or if you are comfortable with the command line than you can install whatever you'd like from there.

Try Pop!_OS, it’s my favorite distro, very polished, and has a friendly community r/pop_os! It the probably the best you can get for Nvidia. Pop!_OS is super clean and the interface has a bit of a learning curve for new users, but you are using packet tracer so i’m assuming that you’ll be able to get used to it fast. This can be remedied by adding the dash to dock “Gnome Extention”: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/

You can get Pop!_OS here: https://pop.system76.com/

Pop!_OS is a pretty good option. It has Nvidia support out of the box and has GNOME as its Desktop Environment. GNOME is pretty minimal out of the box but if you want to make it more slick check out gnome-look.

It also has some other productive features like tiling windows and battery management and all. You could do some gaming on Pop!_OS considering that it is one of the best distros for linux gaming. BTW, I have a dual booted win10 + Pop on my G3 and it has been pretty good for the past year.

Pop_OS! is another great distro I should’ve mentioned. It’s based off Ubuntu but has several differences you can read about here. Right now, I actually use Pop_OS on my desktop (and Mint on my laptop), because it looks and works great right out of the box. The performance is great. Hardware detection is flawless. Just a reminder though that Pop OS uses GNOME by default, if GNOME is not your thing. But I definitely just trying out each desktop environment and see which one best fits your workflow and which one you think looks best.

The newer releases should work fine for you. They’re stable, and they have newer software than an LTS release. I recommend LTS if stability is extremely important. If the newer software is important for you, than a newer release is more suitable for you. Mint is based off Ubuntu 18.04, so the software is a little older. However, they provide regular maintenance and security updates and also provide updates regularly to the Cinnamon DE. You can install new software too on LTS via the flatpak and snap software utilities (although not all software is available).

My best advice to you is to try all three out through a live iso or in a VM and see which you like the most.

> easy to use but also delivers good performance ; everyday use and web surfing.

I think it is only necessary to worry about this if you have an old and underpowered machine. If you have a computer with more than 4GB of RAM then you should confidently be able to throw any kind of Linux at it and have great performance.

Everyday use and web surfing are also things that don't vary too much between distros. For the web, every distro comes with Firefox installed out of the box, and has a way to install chromium if you absolutely must. And for everything else the apps are all the same, although each distro might install different ones by default.

> I now have an RX 570 so drivers should now be much easier.

No doubt :)

The thing to be aware of for AMD drivers is that they are built-in as part of the Linux kernel, to the version of the Linux kernel that your distro ships will also affect the version of the drivers that you get.

I think that by this point in time, even the "LTS" distros with a longer release cycle are already shipping the minimum kernel version required by the RX 570. But I don't know if people still recommend going with a moe recent kernel for good performance or not.

Anyway, for a concrete suggestion, usually Ubuntu LTS is a very safe choice. Since it is the most popular distribution, it is easy to find information about it online. If you are particularly interested in gaming it might also be worth checking out Pop OS. I never used it but it is basically Ubuntu with a few additional tweaks added in.

try kubuntu. Its ubuntu but the de is KDE plasma, which is a nice looking distro that won't eat your ram that much. Use it for a month or two until you get the hang of linux and then switch to another distro of your choice. Ubuntu is very popular, which means there are tutorials and guides more than most distros there are so learning linux with it will be easier.

Wine is going to be a huge headache to support if you're the person people call for tech support. I'd suggest going the virtual machine route instead if folks are going to need Windows apps.

Wine is awesome, but it isn't perfect. I wouldn't give it to my Grandma, because I expect she'd quickly become frustrated with it and blame me.

My two go-to distros for friends and family are Elementary OS and Pop! OS. Former Mac users in particular might like Elementary more than Pop, but both are solid.

Both based on stable Ubuntu releases, nice and polished, and both include some of the best AppStores on Linux.

Fedora is a solid choice for IT, CS students, and professionals. It's a community project sponsored by Red Hat, and is the basis of their enterprise releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Their main release used the Gnome 3 desktop environment, and install images can be found here. If you prefer a different desktop environment, those versions can be found here.

Desktop environment is a personal choice, and the underlying system mechanics are the same.

I would want you to try Manjaro KDE

It uses its own Repository cycle which is indeed quite stable

Plus it comes with the latest and the most beautiful version of KDE Plasma

And also the whole time using it, I never came across even a single dependency issue (a.k.a the greatest nightmare of every linux user ever)

Manjaro has Its own hardware detection tool namely MHWD which automatically takes care of any sort of driver you want

I personally had some shitty Broadcom network card on my laptop due to which I even had to uninstall OpenSuse once because I couldn't find the driver to make it work (Seriously). Manjaro had the driver auto installed during the install

Speaking of packages, Manjaro has Its own GUI named Pamac...... from that single place, you can install and update packages from the Official repositories, Flatpak, snap and AUR at the same time. (AUR is the arch user repository and possibly the single largest repository containing 98% of all packages made for linux)

I can safely say that it is more user friendly than Windows itself

Even still If you're not sure you can just fire up a VM and try manjaro live boot on it

:)

If you already use Manjaro, you might be interested in the XFCE version of Manjaro. XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment, much lighter than KDE or Gnome. It has a minimalist interface and supports plenty of customization. I use XFCE at home and I love it.

As a note, the 2 in 1 flip and touch screen support is generally on an operating system basis, not the desktop manager. I'm not sure what kind of support you should expect for your chosen model of laptop, maybe someone here knows what kind of driver support to expect. My experience with Manjaro is that most everything is supported out of the box, but YMMV.

Distro

There are lots of good choices. I recommend Debian with the Cinnamon Desktop Environment. The setup is a little frustrating, and you'll probably want to add the non-free Repos and setup FlatHub, but once you do you will have an incredibly customizable environment.

Backups

Now that you are going all-in, you need to think about backups. You should mirror your entire hard drive to another storage device. That way you can unfuck any changes you made and get back to work fairly quickly.

You should have a plan to take regular backups.

Clonezilla is reliable software to do this with.

I'm kind of careless, so I just use dd.

If a later kernel is the only thing you’re missing, ukuu might solve the problem: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/ukuu-easy-way-to-install-mainline-kernel-ubuntu

I’ve only used it on Kubuntu, where it was very easy, but I’m assuming given Mint’s Ubuntu base it ought to work there too.

Glad to hear.

It may not be for everyone but I found the Ranger file manager a big help when getting used to the terminal. It's nice out of the box but running:

ranger --copy-config=all

Creates files in ~/.config/ranger you can play around with in your favourite terminal text editor....the rifle launcher file might need a few changes.

Ranger + mpv + sxiv/feh + vim + youtube-dl/yt-dlp is what I've been using day to day since about 2014. It covers a lot of ground without needing to reach for mouse/touchpad. A big plus for me is that nothing has really changed since 2014, the setup works the same on almost any distro.

Ranger + mpv

Example: Adding these scripts to mpv means I can do basic cut, crop & encode of videos I'm watching without touching the mouse or having to google 'least shit linux video editor 2021'.

Ranger aside I use these regularly:

lsblk dfc ncdu htop | grep

tldr is cool, alternative to man pages

A nice shell helps. ZSH set up well is hard to beat. Fish is very friendly but has some weird quirks.

So first off, let me be clear that I am speaking in terms of rolling release distros, both the stable and testing versions of Debian are great at what they do while Sid isn't generally recommended even by Debian. As to your other point, OpenSuse has arguably the easiest system for adding repos (it's in the menu, you literally just have to go switch it on).

By UNITY, do you mean standard Ubuntu (with Unity as the DE) or the actual distro called Unity Linux? I'd recommend neither, since OP already said "Ubuntu is quite nice but..." so I guess Ubuntu is out of the question here, and Unity Linux is dormant.

Ubuntu GNOME, though, I would definitely agree with!

Tbh, I've never used Kali since i'm not interested on hacking at all, but afaik based on what i saw and read, kali is not meant to be a daily-driver OS.

Try different desktop environments and themes, it is really matter of personal choice and customization, I would recommend taking a look at MATE desktop environment, it is one of the most lightweight full feature desktop environment, and if you still want to distrohop take a look at Linux Mint MATE Edition or Solus MATE

BunsenLabs states that Debian's Upgrade Guide from Jessie-to-Stretch works for BunsenLabs also.

"Sensible amounts" is as bit fuzzy bit I think most major distros would qualify. Free software ideology is very important for them.

If you want a specific name I'd recommend Debian or Fedora. Debian has enshrined their commitment to its users and free software in its social contract and Fedora has done similarly in its mission statement.

But as I said before, any Linux distros will be miles ahead of windows and osx when it comes to software freedom and respecting its users. It is just that when I gave examples I wanted to keep the list short.

Could you give us the specs for those laptops? Most important ones are CPU and RAM. To know whether the laptop can run Linux well, knowing what graphics it uses (integrated intel vs discrete gpu) and the model of the wifi card can help. (Knowing these last ones are more help for the samsung one, which you have not tested with Linux yet)

Regarding upgrades, generally speaking it is a good idea to use a recent release if possible. Old versions can have outdated package versions and at some point they stop receiving security updates.

https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

Ubuntu 17.04 is currently unmaintained. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS can still be used until 2021, but most people will want to update to 18.04 LTS by now.

Unlike windows, newer versions don't tend to get more resource hungry. Just make sure you use an appropriate desktop environment for your machine... Ubuntu 16.04 and 17.04 use unity desktop by default, however I dont think it looks particularly windows-y. Maybe you were using something else? Ubuntu 18.04 doesn't support Unity anymore and has switched to GNOME by default. I have successfully used GNOME in computers w/ 4GB of RAM but if you have a weak machine a different DE can indeed be more appropriate.

> Ubuntu 16.04 (starting to get fed up by the problem Gnome gives me).

Just to be clear... Are you using default Ubuntu 16.04 (with Unity) or Ubuntu GNOME 16.04?

> I guess my only requirement is that is Debian Based so I don't have to learn new stuff

If you just want a change of desktop environment, Ubuntu 18.04 would be the least disruptive change. In addition to the default GNOME edition, there are also installers for KDE, MATE, XFCE, LXDE and Budgie: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/flavours

Elementary OS, looks similar to mac os out of the box (pantheon desktop)

Mint, is more similar to a windows look (cinnamon desktop)

Regular ubuntu uses the gnome desktop just as ubuntu gnome does

They are all ubuntu based distributions so the main difference will be in their appearance and pre installed applications (personally i find the less pre installed apps the better to have minimal bloat)

You shouldn't have a problem with those games thanks to proton on Steam.

For a distro, I recommend basic Ubuntu LTS or Kubuntu LTS, since is the most used distro for desktop or server, is really easy to use and even most gamers choose it to play on Steam.

If you don't like the looks of Ubuntu or Kubuntu and want something more familiar and with a "Windows look" go for ZorinOS. On the other hand if you want something with a "Mac feel" choose elementaryOS, it literally just released a few minutes ago.

I would recommend Kubuntu 18.04.

It's based on Ubuntu, so has one of the largest communities and had a lot of support.

The desktop environment retains the "traditional desktop" metaphor like Windows 7, and applications will feel familiar.

For gaming, you'll want to pay attention to Wine, and will probably find Lutris to be useful.

Openbox sounds great for this. I use it personally. It's pretty simple to configure, and I wouldn't expect you to have any trouble setting it up.

If you want to place those few buttons on a panel/taskbar, I would recommend using tint2.

Depending on the text editor needs, it can just be LibreOffice Writer or something really minimal such as Leafpad/Kate.

I'd propose using Thunderbird as the email client, unless they just wanted to use the browser.

As far as the OS: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Debian stable, in my opinion.

Like another person said. You could look into Garuda Linux gaming edition. It has everything you would need. However since it’s based on arch I would suggest installing a LTS kernel for added stability.

Garuda Linux

Is what I personally run for similar purposes, btrfs and timeshift by default, minimum configuration necessary, great gaming support out of the box.

Very nice looking but also highly customizeable.

I personally toned it down a bit, the woddly windows and neonicons were a bit much for my taste(extremely well designed though).

Arch-based, but like I said btrfs and timeshift on by default so you always have backups of your system, in case you break something. You can easily access and boot from then through the grubscreen if you need them.

Edit: Spelling.

Depends really on what customizing you want to do. If your image of customizing is just GUI-related then Pop OS is great for that. If you want to customize, or at least have a finer control of what you want downloaded and used on your system, Arch is a great choice.

As for a mix, I would suggest looking at Garuda Linux, its basically Arch with a installed and customized WM/DE, some pre-installed stuff, and with a focus on gaming. All their flavors look very nice and function nice (at least in my experience) out of the box, and is probably the best choice in terms of what you want if you're fine with some bloat.

Yeah, Zorin is cool. It is constructed of GNOME 3 elements, with custom extensions the Zorin brothers made.

If you want to KDE Neon, I'd suggest an awesome spin of that called Maui

If you want to give openSUSE a try, look at Gecko Linux, which will give you a Live CD/USB boot installer. Gecko comes with all the codecs and non-free proprietary drivers for full hardware support.

As for the others, Antergos is a cool installer for the Arch system. Likely to require Linux experience when some rolling update hits and breaks the system. PCLinuxOS is rolling, but more stable than Arch-based offerings.

I recommend Korora. It's based on Fedora, which is awesome on it's own, but is shipped with multimedia enabled by default and a nice theme.

It's available in several desktop environments, including Gnome.

LFS is not really a usable day to day distro. No matter how much time you put into it, without a package manager you'd be dumping files in the same dirs with no way to keep track so good luck when something breaks or you want to upgrade something. You can try to work around that by forcing packages into their own prefix and only symlinking from root dirs but you'd be surprised how many essential Linux packages ignore prefix compile flags or outright hardcode root dir locations.

LFS is more of a practical exercise for learning how a Linux system works. Give it a shot if you haven't ever tried it, it's a cool experience and it teaches you a lot more about Linux internals than regular distros. But you'll have your work cut out for you just getting graphical drivers, X and a basic standalone window manager working, let alone fancy graphical software like a modern browser (which are some of the most beastly and challenging packages on Earth to get compiled).

I see that GoboLinux is still alive and kicking after 18 years, perhaps have a look at it as an alternative or in addition to LFS. It's basically LFS with a community and helpful tools, plus some cool ideas, like solving the need for a package manager with a clever filesystem reorganization.

debian with a light desktop or a wm, or debian based, such as antix linux, q4os, sparky linux and mx linux.

given the architecture, your computer is probably underpowered for some tasks, so my suggestion is to go with antix linux which uses very little resources that are already limited. it still offers a nice user interface that is easy to use.

https://antixlinux.com/download/

Idk if it runs on ARM, but i'm using AntiX on my 700 mb RAM laptop. Otherwise i heard there is an ARM port of Debian, you can try that as well.

With your specs, I'd consider either LXLE or antiX.

LXLE is based on Ubuntu LTS, is extremely light on resources and was the most trouble-free Linux I've run in old computers and netbooks I tried. However if you wanna venture outside what's preinstalled, it will require you some Linux knowledge.

antiX is frequently updated and is more welcoming to new users. Also it runs really well from a flash drive.

Anything with Mate or Xfce should do, some of their default themes are quite old fashioned.

If you want an ugly distro just to experiment (i.e you won't use it to work/you'll use it in a VM), my personal recommendation would be Damn Small Linux. Back in the day (2008) it was considered to have a little bit of a Spartan look, by 2021 standards, it's definitively ugly.

> RAM: 4GB?

Back in those days, 4 GB was the amount of ram you'd find only in super high end workstations such as the Mac Pro, even Alienware computers "only" had 2 GB. 4 GB of RAM became common until 2010 approximately. If it's a "Basic" computer (and if it hasn't been upgraded), it's more likely to have just 1 GB of ram, maybe 2, although I wouldn't be surprised if it has less.

Bunsen Labs Linux is perfect for that kind of computer: it's compatible with 32 bit CPUs and it's super lightweight. I have a laptop of the same era running Bunsen Labs without much problem

Before I started ricing my own, I used Crunchbang(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchBang_Linux) for a setup roughly like this. These days the closest is BunsenLabs, These are mostly Debian, but with a pre-packaged i3 setup and light versions of applications instead of elaborate ones. I use it on an ooooold Inspiron ~1500 with one CPU and 4GB RAM with some extra services involved so it can serve as NAS also, it idles using between 200-300MB of RAM. It also usually handles non-free wireless/bluetooth well, in my experience it's handled Broadcom without incident.

As u/superflu998 said, there isn’t any distro which looks entirely like the wow interface. You have to modify a distro OR teach him to use a desktop environment.

Endless OS (https://endlessos.com/home/) might be a good one. It has a gnome based desktop environment and is relatively easy to use. You can try it by live booting from a usb without installing it.

Thanks, Void looks promising, but this concerns me on their news page: https://voidlinux.org/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html

"The current project leader has disappeared. We have had no contact with him since the end of January, and no meaningful contact for well over a year. This itself would be concerning, on its own but no threat to the project.

The problem is that we currently have no ability to manage some of Void’s central resources."

Is this still a problem, going forward?

Unfortunately Linux phone offerings are rather limited right now, thanks to major differences between phones as well as DRM. postmarketOS is a good option in general but Amazon Fire 7 is known not to work with postmarketOS.

If you want a Linux phone or tablet then the Nexus 5, OnePlus One, and Fairphone are good options. The new Librem 5 phone and PinePhone were built for Linux.

It's not as intuitive as other distros, and there are some rough edges, but IMHO they are absolutely compensated by its strong points.
All the packages for the nix package manager are nix expressions.
To configure your system you need to declare what do you want in it, and the setup tool automatically downloads and installs everything according to that declaration. As an example, you can see an old version of my configuration.nix.
That file and all the included ones are what define my entire system, from the hostname and IP to my redshift configuration, what users are there in the system, what software installed... almost everything.
Each time you modify your configuration.nix and apply those changes, you have the option to roll them back if something is not to your liking.
I encourage you to try it, and to keep a git repo with your configuration.nix.

Windows taking 10 minutes to boot on a 4-year old gaming laptop? If that's the case, you should reinstall Windows from scratch first. Maybe you could get Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell instead of Windows 10. Running Windows in a VM can be done satisfactorily, but I've only been happy with VMware Workstation/Player amongst all the hypervisors I've tried. Even then, the fans are too loud.

I like Arch in VMs. In my opinion it should stay there, especially on laptops. That would be my opinion for any rolling release. The closest I'd want to get to Arch is Manjaro stable. Even that takes more than average attention when updates come rolling in.

Since you seem like the properly cautious type of user, if you were more experienced with Linux I might suggest NixOS. Who knows, though, because since you've been through Arch, you might be ready for that challenge. It involves a lot of the same type of study and careful follow through.

Before you do anything though, I highly recommend getting Windows back in shape on that system.

maybe EndeavourOS? online install gives you the option to install with plasma without all the configuring.. and you could install pamac from the AUR, if you wish to keep using that

If you want kwin without the rest of KDE, you might try LXQT.

LXQT can be configured to run kwin. Here is how it's done on Manjaro, other distros are similar.

Other than LXQT, you might try something with the Deepin Desktop Environment -- either Deepin itself or any Arch variant. (Manjaro used to have a Deepin edition, but it seems to have disappeared.)

Yeah pretty stable from what I hear. Debian repos anyway. Easy enough to install with their tools but if you want specific details refer to their wiki. An example is this page about KDE: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/system/kde/

From your stated requirements, I'm not sure you'll be able to have newer software and a stable system that doesn't update often.

The closest you could get to those requirements would be MX Linux. It's based on Debian Stable, but has access to their own MX repository with quite a lot of newer software that's been backported. There is also the possibility of using Flatpaks or Appimages, if the software you need happens to come packaged that way.

You might also consider Mageia.