No one I know but me even owns a computer to install it on.

Brian Lunduke

as for info about him... eh, I'll leave you to it.

Void should be fine if you've used arch before. You'll likely have an awkward moment when you go into xfce and there's no audio playing with your music/video, but you can get it working by linking pipewire's folder under /etc/sv into /var/service. There're other ways too

My friends want me to shut the fuck up

That's how we got a Mars Rover clone in a FedEx box

LOL

I only suggest it when someone is complaining about windows.

Hope you are justo trolling

Hahahahahahahaha...dude...hahaha

Bless your heart

Just plain Debian, with either xfce or i3. I have a rediculusly old laptop that runs them both fine. I generally prefer i3 on it because the touchpad is pretty terrible, but xfce works well with a real mouse.

I’m willing to recommend Windows 10 to someone who considers “upgrading” to Windows 11.

Best at what exactly?

Wait, hol'up, please tell me it's because of some socioeconomic reason, not because everyone around you just defaults to phones and tablets. Please.

Exactly.

It's not "randomly recommending an operating system"

It's noticing when people have problems, and providing a solution.

Extraction of wealth from the lower classes

I'm already on NixOS and have been on linux for a few years now. I just wanted to try something a bit different.

I'm going to get obliterated in the distro wars for recommending a Manjaro derivative, but how about Mabox? It's more of a ricing distro, but it's also the most beginner friendly distro I can think of that doesn't use one of the heavier desktop environments but still keeps the floating window paradigm as the path of least resistance. I think you'd be fine, just use the AUR sparingly. https://maboxlinux.org/

Don't forget to see if SMT is enabled... Good chance it is not. Had a buddy go down that rabbit hole earlier today playing around with various BSD flavors.

I have been using Linux for 30 years. Never recommend anything to anyone. It's their decision to make. I will answer questions if asked but I try and be conservative. Lots of people don't need computers and would be better off without them or only need something simple to do their jobs or play games. Also my experience doesn't translate to normies. Inlaw was asking around for laptop recommendations and I just shut my trap. They can buy a Mac or a box store Windows laptop and it will do the job and I won't be on the hook for support.

I am not a preacher and Linux is not a religion. It is an effective tool for technically minded people to get shit done. Nothing more. If companies want to turn it into a product and an experience like Valve or Google then it will end up in more or less polished consumer ready products but that is nothing to do with why I use it.

Maybe it's because the survey respondent hasn't used an OS worth recommending.

When I moved from the Midwest to Los Angeles, CA c. 2013 it was a bit of a culture shock to learn that almost no one had a computer.

I still don’t know anyone who owns one that doesn’t have to work with one.

And it is totally about phones and tablets. I don’t even think the kids learn to type in schools anymore.

Maybe try EndeavourOS.

It's pre-configured Arch, since you said it ran Arch well.

The... second one.

Entire fam and friend circle is okay with paying for things. They have no sense of privacy to remove, and believe any alternative would be too conveluted for a bunch of mobile users to reliably depend on, and they're complerely right.

With zero computer experience, there is no way out. The learning curve is a sheer cliff.

Nothing, not even TOR or i2p would help, their entire OS is backdoored, as is anyone's on stock software.

Oh that's easy, unless they're rich. Costs are gonna keep going up and at some point they'll start asking questions about cliff climbing. 😄

A bunch of non-technical family members have been on Ubuntu for a decade. I'm only involved in LTS release upgrades and hardware failures.

Debian won, I'm trying it first. So far so good, using KDE because Arch ran pretty well with it, but will likely try i3 if this gets slow. Side note: This is the first distro I've tried that shows accurate colors on my laptop! I'd resigned myself to always having a slightly washed out, slightly cool color palette. Not anymore! It looks normal!

If you decide to give i3 a try, I recommend this repo as a sane starting config: https://github.com/shreyas-a-s/debian-i3

i'm a big ol' 5

[for linux!]