Fedora Silverblue.
Or really any immutable OS; they would have to go way out of their way to even edit system files, much less break the system. I just recommend Silverblue because gnome is really hard for an inexperienced user to break.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
82 points (94.6% liked)
Linux
50301 readers
869 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Semi-serious suggestion: Guix or NixOS. They're not break-safe per se, but if they do break something, you can use the OS' previous generations to go back to an operational state. Just... don't let them use the commands that delete older generations.
(Semi-serious because they're both not exactly mainstream and not eactly conventional in their setup.)
Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, "turn it off and then on again" will almost always work to fix the OS.
I've installed popOS to a couple of relatives, haven't had anty issues for a year so far. Can definately recommend!
Any of the ostree variants of Fedora, be they Fedora Official or downstream ones like the Universal Blue family
Mint.
I have my mum (67) and my partner using it.
Libre office and Firefox cover 99.9% of all the things mum actually does.
My partner uses blender, krita and audacity also.
Auto updates... Almost no tech support.
Linux mint makes sense. Auto updates and its hastle free for non techy person like me.
Even if I'm doing something crazy , chatgpt to the rescue.
I prefer Manjaro, super easy.
I'd rather recommend Manjaro to those who want to start out simple, but then get into the details of Linux.
Unless all you do is browsing, Manjaro starts easy but then has a steep curve because it's still Arch, with the added issue of practically every Manjaro newbie ignoring warnings about AUR and getting to taste the consequences.
It will require you to work with the terminal, troubleshoot, and get to understand your system. This is not bad - that's how I got into Linux and never looked back after all all, and I generally don't join the "Manjaro bad" crowd - but this is not a bulletproof "SO distro".
Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like Cinnamon or Gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don't know what you're doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you go
Any immutable distro would do I guess
That is, if you have experience running immutable distros yourself and are able to serve as a tech support for them should they ever need it.
A lot is different under the hood, and general Linux knowledge doesn't always help.
I've got my wife and 5 year old on slackware. They wouldn't know how to screw it up if they wanted to!
Now that's an extreme choice :D
Doing a lot of tech support, don't you?
Nope! Everything just works and it's rock solid. It's also been my daily driver for over 20 years.
I was doing a lot of tech support when my wife was on endeavouros and my daughter was on bazzite. Tbf, my problems with bazzite were probably down to me not understanding the immutable distro concept.
I can absolutely expect Slackware to be solid; my concern is about user-friendliness :D
Not the easiest distro out there.
On the topic of immutable distros, I more or less understood them and kind of managed to work fine with them, but, honestly, I feel all they do is enforce a certain way to interact with the system that makes screwing it up very hard - but on the other hand, introduces a slew of non-standard and sometimes complicated solutions newbies won't understand (even for veterans it takes a while to get a grasp on them). If you follow the same pipeline on a mutable distro, you get the same stability plus the ability to do a lot of things without jumping through the hoops.
Right now I ended up on classical non-atomic Fedora for this reason. It features a lot of safe practices from immutable distros - system snapshots before updating, prioritizing flatpaks, container-oriented terminal able to work with Distrobox among all other things - but at the same time it's a mutable distro able to work with everything else.
If you're not going to give her sudo access then I'd say it'll be really hard maybe even impossible to screw up. Also maybe setup a cron job that'll do auto updates and if needed add in a check to make sure it isn't uninstalling anything. Also how about immutable distro.
BLUEFIN.
Or Aurora/Kinoite, for a more familiar experience
I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad's laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I'd set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)
Nixos with whatever defaults you don’t want her touching, then she can use nix profiles to install extra software if she wants
Has "non techy" evaded you ?
In fairness, there are attempts to make Nix user-friendly, such as SnowflakeOS, featuring a lot of improvements including a graphical app store etc, but those are alpha and not ready for an average user.
You can install imperatively using nice profiles. So you the OP can set up the base distro in a way their SO can’t break. Then any extra software can be installed imperatively using nix profiles. Any installed software will work as normals. Checking the normal places for configurations if their SO even needs to go that far
I’m gonna be the boring guy.
RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)
Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.
Benefits:
- Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
- Actually works
- Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
- If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
- Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.
Drawbacks:
- Boring (for you)
- Not ideal for gaming
If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.
Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.
In the era of Flatpak, I kind of agree with you.
The primary drawback is the complete lack of packages. A home user is going to want something not included and then things fall apart. Flatpaks and Distrobox have made that a lot better.
If you could get away with a RHEL core and Flatpak for apps, you would have a pretty solid setup for a “normal” person.
I both agree with you, and kinda disagree.
If you venture into installing Flatpaks on such a system, just keep in mind that:
- Auto updates must be on
- The Maintainer of the Flatpak in question must be expected to provide security updates for the next five years or so. Personally, I’d only use it for packages provided directly by project maintainers (i.e. Dropbox from Dropbox Inc. as packaged by Dropbox Inc.).
Keep in mind, like 95% of normal people (we are not normal) don’t know what a package manager is and only use
- ”The internet”
- Webmail
- Google Docs
- Spotify
For that, we need the default desktop install and the Spotify app (probably a Flatpak). That’s about it. It’s a glorified web browser with batteries. Treat it that way and keep it that way, unless your SO has any specific needs and requirements.
The limited and dated package set is kind of a feature. Only packages that should work until the laptop breaks, and only packages that won’t change randomly when you update (mostly).
Really seems like we are agreeing. I get that the limited package set is a feature. I also get that it is both too small and too enterprise to satisfy most people you would describe as a “SO” precisely because they are probably normal people.
You gave the excellent example of Spotify and suggested a Flatpak for that. Honestly, I am not sure where we are in disagreement. Especially since I started by “mostly agreeing” myself. We even agree on that. :)
view more: next ›