Any recommendations for a linux distro that i can set up and be reasonably sure my non techy SO won’t break accidentally? The set up doesn’t have to be easy it just has to not break once I leave her alone with it. My first thought was popOS.

My plan is to have 2 profiles and not give her access to sudo. I just don’t want to have to go into it unless she needs a new program.

  • JASN_DE@lemmy.world
    521·
    7 days ago

    Fedora Atomic desktops, specifically Kinoite with KDE6 works well for me, and is basically unbreakable due to the way it works.

    • oaklandnative@lemmy.world
      10·
      6 days ago

      I vote the same, but I’d suggest a uBlue spin of the Fedora Atomic desktops. They have better defaults (all batteries included, as they say) and are easier to use overall IMHO. Bluefin and Bazzite are both great options, and both offer KDE and Gnome variants.

      https://universal-blue.org/

      Edit: TIL the KDE version of Bluefin is called Aurora.

      BTW, uBlue is getting some big recognition lately. They have been on the Fedora Podcast (official) and Framework Laptops has official instructions on their website for installing Bluefin and Bazzite.

    • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
      5·
      6 days ago

      Fedora is a bit too eager to deliver new updates IMO, especially KDE. As much as I love KDE, their .0 releases have had serious bugs several times in a row now. It’s always better to wait for .1 patch with Plasma. It may be hard for the user to break Kinoite, but it won’t save them from bugs.

      Fedora’s mission have always been to push new stuff when it’s “mostly ready” at the cost of inconveniencing of some users, so I wouldn’t recommend it for non-tech-savvy people.

      I know people say that it’s 100% stable for them (as they do for Arch, Tumbleweed, Debian Sid, etc) but that’s survirorship bias. As any bleeding edge distro, Fedora has its periods of stability that are broken by tumultuous transitions to the new and shiny tech (like it was with Pipewire, Wayland default, major DE upgrades, etc). During these times some people’s setup will break and you don’t know ahead of time if it will be yours.

      • asap@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        Pick one of the stable channels from Universal Blue. You get the Fedora atomic goodness, but “ready” rather than “mostly ready”.

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
          1·
          6 days ago

          Does it use the same flawed approach as Manjaro by indiscriminately delaying all updates (including critical security fixes)?

          • asap@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            6 days ago

            It would be whatever Fedora is doing in stable, but that seems unlikely. I’m sure the internet has the answer.

            I’ve been on the latest branch for a year and it’s been rock solid across 2 different laptops.

            • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
              1·
              6 days ago

              I don’t think Fedora has a “stable” channel. It has “testing” repo from which updates are pushed to “updates” repo after approval, and that’s it. My understanding is that ublue’s “latest” channel follows Fedora’s “updates”, while “stable” seems to update weekly (though it’s unclear what happens if a package update arrives in Fedora just before “stable” image is about to be built)

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          6 days ago

          Haven’t used GNOME for a while, but I guess that’s a problem of open source projects in general. Though GNOME at least has Red Hat behind it.