Yeah my daily driver for awhile has been Debian stable. All the normal day to day tasks can very easily be accomplished with only gui tools. My CLI stuff is more or less limited to ssh access to other machines and some light docker tinkering.

OpenSUSE has YAST2-GUI GTK. Full GUI for everything, users, hardware review, even fiddling with kernel, services, or editting text config files via admin gui.

Its not possible to use windows to its fullest without the command line. You can muddle along and miss out without it but you will always hit a point where the cli is the best way forward.

It reaaaally depends. Say the person only needs a browser, once they or someone installs the OS, they can just go to firefox and get started doing whatever they do. If they want to play some games then they might need to learn how to get steam, wine, lutris and stuff installed. However, some distros like Bazzite has that installed. I guess it all depends what they want to do with the computer and how much they want to play around with it.

Yes, entirely possible. I've been using Linux off and on since 2006 and full time as my daily driver since 2018ish. I've used Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Suse, Endeavour OS, Manjaro and various combos of those in that time. I barely use CLI, bar distro updates and a few basics. The fact that you need to use the CLI is a complete myth. I see a lot of responses stating "yeah, but why would you want to?" . That, frankly, is gatekeeping. I fully respect those who choose to use the CLI as a powerful tool, I understand their position. But if someone chooses not to, because they aren't as used to it or just prefer to use a mouse to click around then yes it is possible, and they should be encouraged to run a Linux distro if they want to.

If I had read many of the responses below, back in 2006, I may not have tried Ubuntu when I did and may not be still using Linux to this day.

Does Android count?

I feel like Mint is the move if you never want to utilize the terminal. But while it can be intimidating initially, after using it, you'll grow to love it. Truly makes life way easier. I learned by first finding threads on my issues to copy and paste commands. After doing that enough you'll gain an understanding of the main commands pretty quick. Fedora is a great starter in my mind, as you can do everything through the GUI when first starting, but unlike Mint, you can still get nerdy with the terminal when you feel up to it. Using a VM is a solid option to learn the terminal without any risk, worst case just delete the VM and make another. But you'd have to mess up pretty thoroughly to need to do that in my experience. Fedora, or Nobara which is a gaming and media centric fork of Fedora, are amazing due to the ability to run great out of the box plus being able to dial in anything you want to alter for your needs down the road. Fedora's Software center allows you to add flatpak and snap packages, so it'll all be in one place. Fedora 40 makes NVIDIA drivers pretty easy to deal with too. But this is just my two cents, I'm curious to see what others recommend for you.

Thanks for the list. It'd be interesting to see something like the Are We X Yet sites for Mozilla/Rust projects that tracks this sort of thing

Firefox and forks have Wayland support (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1) by default since version 121 or so.

with certain distros the answer is a resounding "yes" with some others it's a "technically, yes" and with even others it's "good luck!"

UAC-style sudo prompts are are one of the most common issues i can think of. It's very poorly implemented in the distro i use.

my first computer only had a command line

There are tons of things a distro needs to preconfigure for you to work like that.

It can absolutely work. Imagine:

• atomic distro based on uBlue using KDE Plasma
• a working ISO (lol)
• it updates automatically when battery is okay and the network is not metered
• the image uses :latest versions so version upgrades are automatic
• flathub is preinstalled
• install apps
• manage flatpak permissions through KDE Settings
• maybe use btrfs-assistant for some fancy backup and management stuff (but that is not preinstalled)

But for some stuff CLI is needed.

That is very true. Good point.

Debian's great but not the best choice here.

You can definitely hammer a screw, but why would you?

Yes. Pretty much on all distros. Also its a very different feeling than when you do it on Windows. On linux its to do a specif desired task and it doesnt have that strange feeling of just running an obscure that you dont understand command like on Windows.

Keep it to Fedora, Opensuse, Ubuntu/Debian or Endevour. The first two are the bests.

People try their hardest to make computers your friends. Don't be afraid to talk to them 😊

I don’t think you really do anymore. I’d consider myself an experienced Linux user. I’ve been using it as a my desktop OS for over 20 years. I’ve also used Linux heavily through my career and am completely comfortable with the command line.

With recent installs of Fedora the only thing I use the command line for is the initial setup of the multimedia codecs. After that I haven’t been required to touch it.

I used to consider a terminal required to keep your desktop Linux system running. Now I look at is as an optional install for programmers.

The only way I know of to fix the bios time issue when dual booting with windows is using the cmdline on Linux, or regedit on windows.

Nowadays, pretty much yes. I more or less use the command line as much as I did on windows. Of course things like installing software via the repos is more efficient via the command line, but most GUI tools will work perfectly fine for most people.