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submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by fhein@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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.
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[-] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 24 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Mint.

I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.

Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma. My dad's been running it for five years and he doesn't know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice "Linux"). It was also my son's first OS when he was about 8.

[-] fhein@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Mint was my first thought as well. Haven't used it myself but in the past I've heard that it's supposed to be very user friendly and stable, though I'm not really up to date on Linux distros so I wanted to check if this was still was true (which is seems to be) and if there were any new options.

this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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