Basically, which linux distro is the best for a non-power user? Someone who wants to be able to get up and running without having to learn how to manage the OS using the cli.
Quick example: When I install a new OS, the first thing I want to do is install Brave. That should be as easy as “click on this thing, type in brave, select Brave, install.”
I think opinionated is different from being for a non-power-user.
Click ‘brave’ is not opinionated, because I could click chromium instead. “There is a web browser (and it is Firefox)” is more opinionated, and easier at first, then harder if you happen to need a chromium-based browser.
It tries to make things similar to Windows (which most people are accustomed to due to school), and also has its own set of apps that try to make things as simple as possible by having simple names so people know what to expect.
Offtopic, but I’d steer clear of brave. They feel scammy, have crypto built in and replace ads with their own. Since it’s built on chromium it just adds to the market share of chromium and towards a Google controlled internet.
Alas, we have reached a point where lots of web stuff already just does not work in non chromium browsers. My father could not use Netflix on Firefox on Linux mint, we called Netflix customer support and they said to install Google chrome. And it then worked. I use opera and it worked for me too. So a chromium browser is needed, for streaming stuff at least. And non googled chromium probably does not have the commercial addons needed.
What would be the least bad chromium family browser then ?
No idea if any one is less bad from a FOSS, ethical or ideological perspective, but personally I like Vivaldi. I switched back to Firefox for ideological reasons though.
You may be unaware, and it may be that it would have been possible to configure something or install something obscure and not noob friendly, but i can tell that in 2022 that situation happened, i tried to re-install firefox, did a quick google search on possible fixes, tried a handful, the netflix error continued, and then I gave up and called netflix, and installed google chrome.
I deleted my comment because it was a bit trolly and unhelpful. What I should have said is that I believe under normal circumstances, Netflix works in Firefox out of the box. I believe you had an issue, but I wanted to let you and others know, that that isn’t the norm.
I’ve been watching Netflix in Firefox for years now. Never had any issue whatsoever. The handful of times some page didn’t work as expected was when I accidentally blocked too much content through addons. Not saying I don’t believe you, it’s just weird that I never seem to have those issues.
now that you mention, i have plenty of addons on all browsers i use. Maybe i could have made it work by testing one by one, though the chromium browsers all worked out-of-the-box even with largely the same addons. I just do not have the patience for it now, and settled on using Vivaldi for chromium stuff when really needed, which should not be often.
I am a non-power and non-technical user, and after trying Linux Mint (liked it) i tried a relatively obscure distro that i ended up loving: BigLinux
see their site here → www.biglinux.com.br , there is a translation button on bottom right
It is a brazilian distro semi-famous here, continuously developed by more or less a small team since 20 years, but with support for 29 languages including english.
they use a base of Manjaro Linux KDE, which is based on Arch. They install via Calamares, and you select the desktop configuration (windows-like, macoss-like, etc of 6 options).
The motto for the distro is : “In search of the perfect system”, and their goal is more or less to make a linux distro the MOST complete and beginner-friendly possible, sort of going in a Maximalist, anti-gnome philosophy. For this, they have:
Pre-packaged lots and lots of programs out-of-the-box (like rustdesk, both brave and firefox, steam, lutris, jdownloader, corestats, a printscreen program, image sound video converters, etc and 2 whole sections of Webbapps (including all of google stuff - docs, slides, maps - , almost all social media sites, microsoft office, all music streaming and television streaming sites → and you can disable them on the webbapp hub).
The only linux distro i found that out-of-the-box installs ALL packaging methods (i.e. ALL OF THEM). They natively have BigLinux and Manjaro repositories, AUR, Flatpak and Snap (snap is activated by the user clicking in a button, so you can have it or not). They have integration for .appimage, automatic converter for .deb and .rpm installation, java installed and ready to run .jar programs, and Waydroid (for android apps). I know it is possible to do this on mostly any distro, but trying doing that as a noob was unsuccesful for me, i did not know the names of all little programs (or that they existed) , and is a lot of time and pain, this way it really just works.
The software store is great (Big Store), it is completely visual interface, you just type the name of the program, click a button, write the password, and it instals, and again, it has BigLinux and Manjaro repositories, AUR, Flatpak and Snap to search. You can just search on the internet for the other packages, download the .deb .rpm .appimage .apk file, and just click, and it converts and instals them. I never have to worry about linux apps not being compatible for instalation on my distro, ever.
All in all, a truly graphical user interface, out-of-the-box functionality and beginner friendly distro. With the security of manjaro, and the bleedging edge of Arch. Negative point is that it both uses KDE and has a ton of programs pre-installed , so it leans heavy. I could not install it on a 2006 toshiba laptop even the light version, but a 2011 Macbook with ssd runs great. I use it on a Sony vaio 8gb ram 2013 all in one and have no complaints.
I consider their past behavior to be counter to their stated goal of privacy, and counter to the notion that they deserve to be trusted.
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I’d take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn’t the most savory:
… Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.
On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance. He also spreads COVID misinformation.
As others have pointed out, it’s also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.
It’s not crypto mining, because crypto mining is basically worthless on consumer hardware now. What it does is run its own ads and pay you for enduring them and being spied upon by them in its own cryptocurrency.
Quick example: When I install a new OS, the first thing I want to do is install Brave. That should be as easy as “click on this thing, type in brave, select Brave, install.”
Why would you expect that from Linux, that's not even how it works on Windows lol. Basically every Linux distro comes with a software center these days, so that shouldn't be a concern.
Someone who wants to be able to get up and running without having to learn how to manage the OS using the cli.
Your usage of the CLI will be determined by how much stuff you want to do. If all you want to do is use a browser, than any distro will work. If you are a techie that uses a bunch of peripherals and like the latest greatest hardware, I would recommend Endeavor because your hardware will be better supported and installing drivers from the AUR is easy. If you are OK with a slight learning curve with the benefit of having a stable distro you don't have to mess with, I would recommend Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite.
As others have said, Ubuntu is great for non-technical users. The only issue I could forsee is drivers. Apt loves to brick itself after 1 mistake. Since apt lags behind it may not support new hardware, forcing you to download drivers elsewhere, which is a recipe for disaster.
What? Modules (drivers) are absolutely updated all the time. What do you mean between major versions? Of the distro or the kernel? The distros generally choose a specific kernel (lts or otherwise) for their release cycle, but to think it’s static or that backports isn’t a thing isn’t true.
This is all from the POV of a person who just installs Ubuntu and expects it to work. So yes. I meant major releases of the distro and I assumed they weren’t going to fuss with backports.
I figured modules that already exist in the kernel would be updated, but I’ve seen new modules added in later versions of the kernel. And since distro releases seem to stick with a specific kernel version, you would need to completely update your distro to get that support.
Genuinely curious since I haven’t used Debian-based distros in a while, I always thought new modules are installed via the linux-kernel package. Are kernel modules installed separately?
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