A few distros I recommend for people switching:
| Criteria | Distro | |
|
| | "Just Works" family/parent/aunt/uncle/grandparent/media PC for browsing the web and using normal programs (available on Flathub.org) | universal Blue Aurora and Bluefin LTS | | same but want more recent software, more tech savvy person | universal Blue Bluefin, Aurora, Fedora atomic Desktops | | really need custom software like VirtualBox (might run on above though), stuff not available as Flatpak, appimage, RPM or working through distrobox | Debian, OpenSUSE Slowroll, NixOS | | same but want more recent updates | OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, NixOS unstable | | Fixing my computer is my hobby | Arch, Gentoo, ... |
I explicitely, from experience, do not recommend
- Linux f**ing mint or other nieche Distros stuck on X11, that will convince new people that Linux is worse than Windows
- Fedora regular as upgrades always break
- Ubuntu due to snaps, weird upgrading system, weird decisions, nonstandard customizations breaking things
- Ubuntu derivatives due to LTS
- small nieche distros made by few people like Nobara or CachyOS (If you dont plan to distrohop at any time)