with the recent windows news, I wanna switch to Linux. I tried mint a few years ago and was annoyed and frustrated with multiple things, like having to input the password all the time and the general ammunt of constant trouble shooting and needing a tutorial for the most basic things.
I want a distro that:
- Is very user friendly, ideally not requiring a terminal
- Is hard to accidentally fuck up
- ideally doesn’t require a password for every input
I basically just use my laptop to browse the web, draw in krita and use ms office apps (have been getting used to open office lately)
What do y’all suggest?
Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.
Windows troubleshooting is always SFC and DISM as the new “have you tries turning it off and on again” default first recommended step lol.
Zorin is user friendly. You may still need to use a password for doing updates.
If you game, then probably Bazzite.
If you hate the command line you could try tumbleweed, you will have Yast2 GUI apps for everything yo want to alter on the system. And it has automatic snapshotting if out you mess things up, you can boot to a previous snapshot. Howeverits will require a password whenever you want to make system changes. And a learning curve compared to other distros.
Not really getting away from typing a password, that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
that’s the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn’t have permission.
All a malicious script has to do is alias
sudoin your .bashrc, and you’re fucked. The script can do that without privileges. It takes surprisingly little to go from “I’m only running this script without privileges” to getting totally owned immediately after.I guess that depends on distro, because sudo on OpenSUSE requires root password, so a script isn’t doing anything unless you enter the password
The script would place its own version of sudo in your
$PATHand wait for you to enter the password. Then it has it and can do what it likes with the information.Then it’d just tell you “wrong password” and forward you to the real sudo so that you can keep on working like nothing happened.
Edit: Or even better, pass your own commands to take over the whole system to the real sudo.
Disable aliasing I guess, or change to root owner, read only permission
Yes, every distro requires a password for sudo. That’s the whole point of it. But editing .bashrc does not require sudo. You can add aliases and functions to .bashrc. A malicious script can append to .bashrc, and by doing so, it can alias sudo to be whatever command it wants. For instance, a malicious function. So the next time you run sudo it runs the malicious command, instead, which itself can act just like sudo and prompt you for your password. So now you just entered your password into a malicious function. Do you see the problem with this?
Then lock bash rc as read-only and root permission only, or disable aliasing altogether I guess
I’d like to know a bit more about your troubles to answer.
Do you know what desktop you were using? If so, what did you like and what didnt you like?
Where were you reentering your password all the time? Was it logging in, logging in after the screen went dark, the wallet, etc?
What sort of troubleshooting were you doing? Was it an application not working, a piece of hardware, or something else?
The reason I’m asking these questions is because most people are interacting with just the desktop GUI, so some of your issues (password) may just be configuration, the distribution won’t matter. If your troubleshooting was due to hardware, there may be a better choice.
For example, I use Debian everywhere. That said, there are times where certain pieces of software or certain pieces of hardware work better with a different distribution. On my T480, I’m using arch, mostly because of the fingerprint reader and a some things I’m building will be easier this way.
Generically speaking, it doesnt matter which distribution you use, you can do the basics on all of them. What it can come down to is familiarity, hardware, and purpose, and the guiding principles for each distribution.
+1 for Bazzite (or another one from https://universal-blue.org/ ), very hard to destroy, if an update breaks something just choose old install during boot and wait a few weeks before trying again. I am kinda savvy but don’t really need (or can 😸) tinker with the system.
Where are you based? Maybe someone from https://endof10.org/ or another local hacker grouo could help you in person. There are regular install parties in my city.
It looks like you want SteamOS. I recommend either getting a Steam Deck, wait for the Steam Machine or install it compatible hardware if you have any. No Nvidia GPUs.
SteamOS checks all three requirements for the most part, maybe 3 not so much. But it will be near impossible to fuck it up as it has a read-only filesystem and all apps are installed through flatpak which are sandboxed similar to apps on iOS.
Any one of the uBlue projects is perfect for this use case.
KDE: https://getaurora.dev/
Gnome: https://projectbluefin.io/
Gaming: https://bazzite.gg/Install and setup once, run forever. Immutable so impossible to break for a non-tech user, no package upgrades fuck-ups because updates are atomic and don’t touch the currently running system, are done in the background and are completely invisible for the user, great hardware support, based on Fedora. Regular users can only install Flatpaks through the App Store.
The only “maintenance” needed is a weekly reboot to move to the latest OS image.
As a personal feedback, I moved my gadget enthusiast but tech illiterate father on Bluefin. He can ruin a Mac in less than a few months. He can generate undocumented bugs on iOS by his mere presence. He hasn’t touched the terminal in his life. But somehow, Bluefin is still running perfectly after a year and a half. That’s how robust it is.
As a side note, passwords are extremely useful for basic security, and a password less life is extremely dangerous. The fact that you need to input a password tells you that you’re doing something that requires extra care and attention.
If you’re lucky to have a fingerprint reader that supports Linux (extremely rare unfortunately), you can get away with typing your password once at login and using your fingerprint for everything else.
So, I’m gonna be a bit of a contrarian here, but my main advice is to abandon requirements 1 and 3.
As to 2, you’d be looking for an immutable or atomic distro, those are harder to fuck up.
BUT I urge you not to be afraid of the terminal, it isn’t as scary as it looks! Try watching/following along with a couple “linux terminal for beginners” or “bash for beginners” videos on youtube like they’re a class. They’ll teach you the basics you need to be a LOT more comfortable within like an hour, and you’ll be a lot better off for it. I did the same and now a few years in I prefer the terminal for many things and cringe when I have to use the windows GUI at work for something that would take seconds on linux by typing one command that amounts to a sentence. It’s a very powerful and convenient tool and I reccomend not shutting yourself off from it.
No matter the distro, you’re likely not going to fuck it up so bad it can’t be fixed, but do be careful when using sudo in the terminal as that is when it’s more likely. That said, no matter what (even if you stayed on windows), you should keep offsite backups of your most important files, things you couldn’t just redownload again. That way if you do fuck up, you can always just reinstall and replace your files no problem, it’s free! Sure nobody wants to take like an hour to do that, but still nothing gets lost which is the most important part.
As for not requiring a password, no. You want the password checks. Security is important, and what’s more the password checks themselves can act as a “be careful this could fuck your shit up” warning. As annoying as they are, it can be a good thing!
I’m sure you’ll get plenty “try this distro” responses so I’m not even going to go there, but my advice honestly applies to all distros equally.
Tl;dr: Passwords safe, terminal good actually.
if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.
fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.
silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.
Based on those requirements, honestly, I’d recommend a Mac. Very user friendly, no terminal, very, very hard to fuck up, and only needs authentication when you’re changing system settings.
Macs do things a little differently, so you’ll have to learn the Apple way, but generally it’s all very dead simple point and click.
Thanks but no, I don’t want to buy a completely new hardware just to change my OS
macOS has a terminal and sometimes you will still have to use it even if not as often as *Linux, except that it works differently from GNU+Linux distros and even from BSD that you will have fewer resources to rely on.
You should check Mint again, things in the Linux world are improving fast lately. Some people got their grampas into Linux and they are happy using it, with your use case it can easily also be the case, the terminal it’s not needed, may be sporadically and to setup some things as you like at first, like changing settings to not enter passwords, may be it’s not so safe but it’s not as unsafe as using Windows. Just get used to the good habit of making regular backups. In any case just make a post asking and we will be happy to help. Just go ahead and slowly you will get confidence to do more difficult things. The freedom that you experience using Linux really worth it, but it can take time to appreciate.
First, try LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; it is a highly maintained fork of the latter, with plenty of improvements. Another thing is, even if there are GUIs for everything, do not be afraid of using the terminal! As another commenter noted, it can even be easier. As for passwords, it is like that for security purposes; if you disable it, you’ll be at a higher risk of breaking something.
I recommend zorin os. Its an ubuntu lts (long term support) respin that is fine with proprietary software so will offer to install nvidia drivers and such if you want. This means its anything but bleeding edge and about as stable as your going to get. It tries to mimic the windows look and feel to be comfortable to windows users. Then it is also an out of the box distro which means it comes with software someone would exect a laptop to have and then some. so it will have libre office and a browser and software to play and edit audio, photos, video and software to burn a disk if you have a burner. Even an rdp client. It also has wine setup with play on linux so you can right click a windows exe and run or install it (may or may not work depending on the windows program). When you find programs online if it has a debian download you can use that or you can check a gui add software ting and search for it with the spyglass icon. Its about as easy as you will get. That being said I often recommend people install onto their last laptop if they have one that did not break when they replaced it. Linux runs so much better than windows that the old one will often run better than windows on teh new one.
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ideally not requiring a terminal
No chance, sorry. Look at every Linux distro in existence and you’ll find the terminal pinned in the Dock. Learning to use it is just part of The Linux Experience.
ideally doesn’t require a password for every input
You can enable autologin, but in my experience this just means you have to enter your password in every time you open a new app. You can look into Howdy. Basically the Linux equivalent of Windows Hello. But this will require terminal to configure as well. And most likely still wont work because biometric hardware is rarely compatible with Linux.
Did you set your Mint to autologin to desktop? If so then your Keyring is then locked and you get prompts to unlock it when you want to use anything that needs it - websites, software like email etc. The keyring holds your passwords and credentials to pass to on as needed and keeps your system secure. If you set your desktop to not autologin - i.e. have a login screen - your keyring is unlocked automatically as you log on to the PC and you don’t keep getting prompts to unlock the keyring. You can disable the keyring entirely or give it a blank password, but it’s better to use the login screen to keep your device secure, and let the keyring do it’s thing in the background even though “login automatically” is so easy to tick and use. The wallet is the same concept on KDE desktops.
Otherwise the only password prompts you should get are similar to windows - when you want to make system level changes.
I’d recommend OpenSuSE Leap with KDE. User friendly, stable, with a good GUI for making all system changes. Fedora KDE is also a good popular distro; I’m not sure how good it’s GUI is but I’d be surprised if you need to use the terminal. People often recommend the terminal (because it IS quicker - often one step instead of “go here, click here, click here”) but there is usually a GUI way of doing everything.
