bsergay

Thank you for the reply!

Disclaimer: After a couple of revisions and rewrites, I concluded that directness and conciseness was required. If my tone seems confrontational at times, I would like you to know that that's not my intent. Therefore, in such cases, I would like to friendly request you to assume the best. Thank you.

User-friendly articles

How is uBlue's documentation not user-friendly? Be specific and come with an example.

forums

Naive in a post-Discord world.

User-friendly ~~articles an~~d answers ~~on forums~~ to absolutely all more or less common issues

Based on what do you imply that uBlue's discourse and Discord has failed this? Again, be explicit and give an example.

It's very important for a new user imo. We shouldn't overwhelm them with choices and technical documentation.

Assumes new users to be sufficiently homogeneous in this regard. The silent majority is not accounted for.

choices

What choices?

If you don't believe me

I believe there's definitely some truth in your earlier made statements.

check some content creators. They all agree that we should just give them a popular distro like Mint or Ubuntu and let them progress as fast as they can.

Even if that's true, I think it's hilarious to appeal to their consensus 😂.

Recommending Fedora and especially its atomic spins without much documentation to a new user?

To be clear; while OP does mention "Fedora Silverblue" to introduce and contrast atomic distros to traditional ones, they only explicitly recommend uBlue images.

And while it's by no means as exhaustive as the ArchWiki or Gentoo Wiki, uBlue's documentation isn't a slouch either; I've seen far worse. If possible, could you name what's crucially missing?

From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else

You definitely can.

is this fairly straightforward to do?

It ain't bad. However, I would opt for a distro that defaults to the preferred DE. In this case, similarly to Linux Mint, the distro would have to be beginner-friendly, popular, polished and stable^[2]^. So, IMO, that would be:

• GNOME^[3]^; Pop!_OS or Zorin OS
• KDE Plasma; Tuxedo OS
• Xfce; MX Linux

Note that there are many other DEs. However, the above mentioned DEs (together with Cinnamon) are the most polished and popular. And while there are many other distros through which you might 'consume' said DEs, the distros mentioned above are the ones I (personally) like to recommend.

1. At least relatively speaking.
2. Stable is used here in the context of meant to be used without updating for 'extended' time; except for security updates.
3. While both default to GNOME, they differ pretty significantly in how they're setup and the associated envisioned workflow.

Wonderfully laid out. Couldn't agree more.

I'm also curious to find out how effective welcome screens are.

I suppose the most effective would be if the user is told how to act whenever they're about to commit a 'mistake'; after which they're friendly reminded what they should do instead 😅. But I believe that's a gargantuan effort to effectively gameify the distro 😂. Cool idea though; hopefully some iteration is already in the works.

Perhaps that makes him the perfect candidate 😂.

Hehe, consider to keep us updated 😜.

Thank you for the clarifications!

Regarding what you mentioned on Debian; ultimately, you're a lot more experienced than I am with it. But, IIUC, Debian 12 should have done a great job at easing (new) users into its ecosystem. Not sure if it's sufficient though.

I think immutable distros could be great for newbies, but I’m just thinking they’re still so new that if you go online to look for Linux advice or help, most things you’ll find are very much not for immutables and I doubt a true newbie understands what’s what.

I definitely agree. But, I think it's sufficient to communicate to new uBlue users that they should check uBlue's own documentation first. And, if they didn't find the answer there, that they should ask on discourse or on Discord.

I only addressed this for new uBlue users as I don't think other immutable distros are sufficiently newbie-friendly yet.

I'm well aware that both elementaryOS and its Pantheon DE were innovative and made major strides for user-friendliness a couple of years back. Hence, they rightfully earned a spot among the newbie-friendly distros. However, I might be wrong, but it feels as if they haven't been able to keep momentum. And therefore lost their significance.

If you think I'm wrong, please feel free to correct me; I would love to be educated on how elementaryOS has kept relevance (if they actually have).

but I don’t think immutable distro are a good place to start.

FWIW, the first distro I used and subsequently daily-drove^[1]^ was Fedora Silverblue over two years ago. The try-hard in me immediately started off (or at least tried) applying the hardening outlined in Madaidan's article. After banging my head for a week, I started actually using the system and it has been a very smooth ride ever since. The uBlue images are straight up better when it comes to the OOTB-experience without even mentioning the associated 'managed'^[2]^ aspect that comes with it. Therefore, I believe that they're perfectly suitable. They're not for everyone, but no distro is anyways.

1. I forgot to mention how simultaneously I quit Windows cold turkey as well.
2. The uBlue images are able to 'prevent' breakages that would otherwise affect everyone.

First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.

Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine:

• I absolutely love Fedora. But if it's named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain't the case. Hence, at least mentioning the Howto page of RPM Fusion would have been sensible to combat issues users might experience otherwise.
• I'm fine with the inclusion of openSUSE Aeon, but openSUSE Kalpa is literally in Alpha. Therefore, it's too early to be recommended.
• I'm personally not very bothered with Fedora Workstation on the list of distros geared towards beginners, while Debian is found on the list of power-user distros that beginners should avoid instead. ~~(I'm a die hard Fedora fanboy anyways.)~~ However, I am curious to your reasoning/justification.
• Alpine Linux was originally envisioned as an embedded-first distribution. Therefore, most of its design choices revolve around that; small, secure, simple et cetera. The way that you describe/depict Alpine Linux, is more in line with how I would for (what I'd refer to as) demonstrative distros like Artix and Devuan.

What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?

Windows 10

So what’s your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?

Freedom and privacy