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?
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.