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Comment by kgraves | Hacker News Reader

Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?

Ubuntu, because it's the most common choice, so has the most coverage/support by other people and tools.

If I'm routinely going off-road, I want to stick to relatively known trails. I'll save scaling mountains for my holiday.

> Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020?

Pretty decent for anyone who can tolerate default Gnome and has the right hardware. So, no, still not ready to be a drop-in Windows replacement for casual users.

> What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?

What's normal? Normal HN reader? Probably Debian-nonfree, which has all the good parts of Ubuntu and almost none of the bad. Soccer mom pinterest poster though? Windows or Mac.

IMHO, Linux on the desktop is still for those with an above-average interest in computers. Hardware support is getting pretty damn good and software support is great, provided you know about the FOSS options. However, you're also pretty likely to run into some kind of snag that you will either have to just tolerate, or fix yourself by gradually learning how to poke about in the terminal.

Openness leads to diversity which inevitably makes standardization harder. Thing is, I prefer that to the ever-increasing user disempowerment in Windows and MacOS.

> Soccer mom pinterest poster though? Windows or Mac.

Why? If she is going to use the browser almost exclusively, she wouldn't even notice what OS she is using.

This has been my experience after I installed Fedora on my folks' laptops. Pretty much the only support they've required is the occasional major version upgrade I do for them when I visit. Regular patches get autoinstalled.

They'll use Wi-Fi or USB tethering with their phones for internet browsing and my dad will occasionally connect the laptop to the TV set to watch some videos, and it all just works.

Because it's far more likely she'll run into some kind of problem with hardware or software incompatibility. And why does her computer make such a noise when she's watching Youtube and Netflix? And why did her touchpad suddenly stop behaving like it used to after a system upgrade?

There are problems with Windows and Mac for casual users too, but it'd be sugarcoating things to say that Linux isn't far more likely to spuriously act up.

I've given quite a few debian laptops to different normal/ computer illiterate users. There are snags, but not more than on windows.

The people who have trouble are the power users. None of the more advanced tricks work anymore, everything is different and weird, and they dont want to relearn from scratch.

Try Fedora. It comes with vanilla GNOME by default, and also has variants (they call them "spins") with KDE Plasma, XFCE, LXQT, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE and even SOAS Desktop. Most software have packages for Fedora, so for a normal person it should "just work".

I use Debian myself, but you may want to stick with Ubuntu if you're unsure about it (Ubuntu has more up-to-date versions of things and if you run into trouble, you'll have more support). Just one thing though, if you're wondering which version, go with an "LTS" (Long Term Support) version. While you should be upgrading your distro when you can, if you choose not to the LTS versions keep their packages available for much longer, so you won't be left high and dry. The latest version (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) is an LTS version, so you should be good to go :)

So KDE have a distro which they don't call a distro.

Essentially it's ubuntu 18.04 but KDE packages are from the KDE team.

https://neon.kde.org/

Mint XCFE

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3834

Mint for sure. I will be setting my grandma up with Mint soon, it's that good.

I vote for openSUSE tumbleweed, with gnome (NOT Kde) and the SLES desktop design.

Ubuntu - you have a wide choice of desktops - kde, gnome, etc.

Mint with Mate window manager

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