Linux Mint. Everything including full system version upgrades and GPU driver installations can be done via GUI.
The default look and feel is Windows-y, and the Mint team does a great job of pre-loading their distro with all the basic apps most people need, including a good printer app, scanner app, PDF viewer, media player, etc.
What is the LTT Linux test? I know its a reference to the LTT YouTube channel and the fail they experienced. But how do we a LTT Linux test and report it as a success?
Linux Mint
I'm going to comment again, not to be an asshole, but because this is an entirelt separate stream of thoughts from my previous comment:
'GUI/UX for everything, absolutely no CLI' approach
That's not a distro thing, it's a Desktop Environment thing. I personally use GNOME on my daily driver, but I've also used Xfce and MATE and gotten away with those. I'd say that GNOME is probably the most "idiot proof," which is why I use it, but YMMV.
Linux "requiring the CLI" hasn't been true for quite a few years now, it just has stuck around for a couple of reasons (imo):
Tutorials/guides/advice about Linux tends to focus on the CLI because it's easier to figure out someone's OS and have them copy-paste a command, than to find out the specifics of their graphical setup and walk them through every window and button press.
New users need to know and understand the difference between Kernel, OS, and Desktop Environment to find the answers they're looking for.
If you tell Grandma that you installed Linux for her, the first time she tries to figure it out herself, she's gonna search "how to change volume in Linux" on Google, and she's going to be bombarded with a thousand answers all saying something different, most telling her to install programs, and most telling her to use the command line. Because Linux is not an operating system, it's a family of dozens of operating systems that can each be configured thousands of different ways.
If you tell her "I installed Fedora," she's going to run into the same issue, but on a lesser scale. At least there's only a few hundred different ways on a per-distro basis.
If you tell her "I installed GNOME," she will look up "how to change volume in GNOME," and find her answer. But now you need to explain to her the difference between the three, and when to include that information in her searches, and she will ask "why could I just say 'how to X in Windows?' and didn't have to memorize 3 different names for the same thing that all give me different answers???"
And yes, your grandma will just call you to ask anyway, but what about when it's your friend trying to figure it out at 3 am and he can't get ahold of you?
Meanwhile, the terminal is (more or less) distro-/DE-agnostic. So their options are to learn more about how is Opperating System formed than they'll realistically ever need to know, or use the reviled terminal. Such is the plight of DIY OSes.
I see that as full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac (is no middle click to paste).
Linux is not Windows. Stop trying to make it work like Windows. Windows is crap and I don't want Linux to work like it.
Expecting Linux to work like Windows is how new people get frustrated. Have you heard anyone say that macOS needs to be like Windows to succeed? Of course not. So stop saying that about Linux.
Also, "no middle-click to paste" is astonishingly stupid, I've been using it hundreds of times per day for way over a decade now. It's one of the most useful and helpful features I've ever used.
you'll become comfortable with the cli, it's seriously not hard.
all you need to know to start is:
then you can branch out from there
OpenSUSE has YaST which allows for more GUI customisation than some other distros. Might be worth seeing if that is what you are interested in.
Even on Windows and macOS you will have to use the command line for some tasks sooner or later.
For what in example? I used Windows for 8 years and then from time to time after that, plus helping my brothers computer with modern Windows. I never had to use the commandline. But maybe there are some tasks that requires it, because there is no GUI for. What would that be?
no you wont
Elementary OS
Linux Mint comes closest ime, but it really depends what you want to do. You should ask yourself this question: am I a power user? If the answer is 'no', and you just need to do basic media/productivity stuff, you're going to have a frictionless experience with most popular Linux distros. If the answer is 'yes, but I don't want to learn another operating system' then you should stick with what you know.
Plain old Fedora works great. My mom uses it and is fine with just the app store.
It doesn't really pass OP's criteria if you need to install Nvidia drivers, though. It does not have a 1-click graphical installer like Mint and Ubuntu do.
full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac
You want Windows or Mac.
If you want a computer that you can do stuff like web-browsing, document/spreadsheet/pdf/slideshow editing/creation, gaming, or multimedia processing on, there are distros and utilities on Linux that make those more-or-less easy and beginner-friendly,
BUT it requires divesting oneself of the habits, behaviors, and paradigms of other operating systems and being willing to learn anew. Community-based Libre software is developed in an entirely different way for an entirely different purpose; because of that, it is nearly impossible to recreate the same software as for-profit proprietary software. One is made by a community hacking together a functional system that suits their needs, the other is made to generate revenue, and thus has to keep users dependent on it by trapping them in dark patterns and igorance of its workings.
If you just want "Mac or Windows, but free as in beer," suck it up, pay the devil his due, and buy one of those OSes. Libre Software is an entirely different paradigm, and thus requires a whole paradigm shift before anyone will be happy with it; on-boarding people who aren't ready to divest themselves of the old paradigm just leads to disgruntled users who blame you for anything wrong with their PC, and creates a market void in the FOSS community ready to be filled by corpo proprietary slopware.
Mint or Fedora require no more command line than Windows does.
I daily drive Debian and it doesn't require CLI for anything other than troubleshooting the problems I caused myself. There has been one time in 5+ years where it booted to console because the maintainers made changes to the kernel that fucked up the legacy nvidia drivers, and it had a workaround of booting to a previous kernel until they fixed it within the week. For newbies that might be scary the first time it happens, but its an easy fix that still didn't require the CLI.
But nowhere did I say Linux required the terminal, I was addressing a different part of OP's question. I guess since it's such a prevalent myth, not denying it is tantamount to implicit agreement, so here's me denying it.
Been in and out of Linux since 2006.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon DE is the only distro I've ever used that worked flawlessly for everything without needing to use the terminal at all. It worked so well it was boring. It's the only distro I would recommend to a lay person
Getting hung up on feature parity with Windows and Mac is both a waste of time and literally impossible given the major differences between those two UIs. KDE already does most of that legwork anyway, and you can disable middle click paste easily.
IMO your time would be best spent making GUI tooling that doesn't already exist. Identify a pain point for you that forces you to the terminal and start there.
Not helpful
Really great advice, was thinking of that myself recently. I’m considering making some GUI apps to address my terminal journeys. While I enjoy terminal, not everyone should.
The distro shouldn't matter too much, but the desktop environment will.
I recommend using KDE if you want something similar to Windows, and GNOME if you want something similar to macOS.
Using a GUI also isn't really dependent on the DE either for most programs. It's dependent on whether or not a GUI for it exists in the first place.
Is MacOs "absolutely no cli"? It wasn't when I was using it (admittedly, some 10yrs ago), except maybe for the basic things which any mainstream linux distro also provides.
What about Windows? Back in the day I would have paid to have a semi-decent CLI instead of being forced to use regedit (I hear regedit is still going strong, but I've not touched windows for an even longer period than MacOs)
What about Windows?
Every Microsoft forum suggestion:
sfc /scannow
Windows hasn't been "No CLI" since the requirements for TPM were added to Win 11 at the latest. Arguably, it's been even longer if you wanted to get any customization beyond "changing window border colors and desktop background," or if you wanted to do "hacker" stuff like remove start menu ads, but I guess most average users just didn't bother.
Resentment aside, this is more attacking the letter of the query than the spirit. At best, OP admits the terminal isn't bad and scary but still wants a distro that works best for GUI-focused people, at worst their eyes glazed over and they stopped reading everything you said after "when I was using it"
Well, if you prentend iterm does not exist, you can probably still use a mac to browse the web.
What kind of contributing?
If you mean actually adding code or packaging or testing or anything along those lines, you’re probably looking for gnome. They hate normal linux stuff like middle click paste.
If you mean contributing by using linux, just pick something and start. You’ll have a lot to learn no matter what so there’s no point wasting time trying to figure out what you’re gonna want and working towards that.
If you mean putting other people on linux, don’t do that. It will make them unhappy and cause you lots of stress and work. Find a way to keep them on the systems they’re familiar with, either by using the well documented windows 10 iot ltsc or the accessibility options in macos. People deserve to choose weather or not they switch operating systems and when those decisions are made for them it needs to be done by those who will be working with them every day.
It would be helpful if your example of behaving identical to macos or windows were more clear, since macos and windows behave wildly different from each other. It’s like saying you need a normal european car that works just like your 2500 Silverado or civic si.
I don't know of any that need some final push. I would think it would be better to just contribute to kde or gnome ui/ux wise. I would say my distro but I almost never click the scroll wheel and just tried it out and it does paste on middle click. No idea why that would be a deal breaker. Also have no idea what windows does on middle click even though its been the majority of what I used day to up until a year or so ago or for the mac even though I used it in the late aughts.
Would suggest Linux Mint
I suggest LMDE not regular mint. Normal mint updates often and ocassionally with bugs while rare and mostly I see for gaming they do happen. Stability and reliability are king. So LMDE aka Linux mint debian edition. Its entirely the same as normal mint made by the same people but it's rock solid unlike Ubuntu version.
Sincerely I've used both to game and daily pc usage even work. LMDE no questions.
Regular Mint is much closer to what the OP is asking for. It removes the crappy Ubuntu stuff but gets to benefit from the good stuff like better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates and PPA support which is especially important if you have an AMD GPU as it's how you'll get up-to-date Mesa.
Mint, (?)ubuntu, and Pop!_OS are what I suggest because 1) most software install guides target these distros. Anything that uses a package manager other than apt means extra googling and pain for those who just want an OS that works and could care less about the miniscule advantages of one over another 2) stable releases and driver support and 3) similar UI to whatever they're coming over from. Someone else ITT mentioned KDE for Windows and Gnome(or Cosmic once it's stable) for Mac folk and I think that tracks well
Linux Mint is often recommended to users coming from Windows, so... Kubuntu, Pop!OS and OpenSuSE are maybe also decent for that use case.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has a GUI for almost everything. It has a nice GUI for basic system config, and uses YaST2 for deeper settings, and it uses Discover for Flatpaks as well as system library updates.
Although, I have seen a couple people say Discover shouldn't be used for doing system updates because it can fail, and to only use it for Flatpak updates and installs. I dunno. But it's not like typing sudo zypper dup to do a distro upgrade is hard, so I just do that out of an abundance of caution.
OpenSUSE has some other cool features too, like having Snapper installed by default for system snapshots. It's pretty easy to roll back if an upgrade goes sideways. There's a boot entry that lets you open a previous snapshot as read-only and then you can make that snapshot permanent by creating a new top-level snapshot from it. So then you can at least use your computer while you try to figure out why the upgrade you did failed.
You'll probably want to use KDE as your desktop environment. It'll be somewhat familiar if you're use to Windows, and it has a lot of features that make it comfortable to use.
There are lots of good YouTube videos on why OpenSUSE is pretty cool. Check some out.
My experience with ZorinOS has been quite smooth. Though i have opened the terminal for advanced customization and problems with my hardware (nvidia gpu and weird disks configuration), i think there's good chances you don't need it. Although im not very tech savy and i've heard people say that it's not a very good option because they're based on stable but quite old versions of Linux, so i'm just putting the option out here, not saying it's the best
Bazzite is the correct answer. Or steam OS. Anything immutable. Mint is not the right answer.
There is no right answer. While I love immutables, they bring their own set of problems to the table.
Sure but they answer the question correctly, whereas alternatives don't.
It's not about what you prefer, it's about what meets the answer to their question most appropriately.
They are asking for a 100% gui/ui experience with not having to access the terminal.
The right answer to send someone to in that case with the ecosystem we have, is immutables. That what they are for.
They said GUI everything AND "just works". I was more so referring to the latter.
My point is that nothing "just works". With immutables, your system is less likely to break after updates, but introduce other headaches.
On a traditional distro, you can use pretty much any format. Traditional packages like deb/rpm, flatpak, snap, Nix, distrobox, etc.
That's not the case for immutables. Bazzite primarily uses flatpak, but (1) not all apps are available as flatpaks, (2) not all apps work well as flatpaks, like IDEs, (3) apps may have permission issues that require some know-how and tweaking to fix. Bazzite also comes with Homebrew and Distrobox, but (1) Homebrew doesn't have many GUI apps for Linux, (2) apps may not behave as expected in containers and don't integrate as well. Finally, as a final resort, there's layering but that (1) requires the terminal, (2) may not be allowed in the future as Universal Blue is going more bootc native without rpm-ostree support, (3) may not even run Fedora in the future if they like their "distroless" version more.
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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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