Linux Mint. Everything including full system version upgrades and GPU driver installations can be done via GUI.

The default look and feel is Windows-y, and the Mint team does a great job of pre-loading their distro with all the basic apps most people need, including a good printer app, scanner app, PDF viewer, media player, etc.

Linux Mint

What is the LTT Linux test? I know its a reference to the LTT YouTube channel and the fail they experienced. But how do we a LTT Linux test and report it as a success?

I’m going to comment again, not to be an asshole, but because this is an entirelt separate stream of thoughts from my previous comment:

‘GUI/UX for everything, absolutely no CLI’ approach

That’s not a distro thing, it’s a Desktop Environment thing. I personally use GNOME on my daily driver, but I’ve also used Xfce and MATE and gotten away with those. I’d say that GNOME is probably the most “idiot proof,” which is why I use it, but YMMV.

Linux “requiring the CLI” hasn’t been true for quite a few years now, it just has stuck around for a couple of reasons (imo):

1. Tutorials/guides/advice about Linux tends to focus on the CLI because it’s easier to figure out someone’s OS and have them copy-paste a command, than to find out the specifics of their graphical setup and walk them through every window and button press.

2. New users need to know and understand the difference between Kernel, OS, and Desktop Environment to find the answers they’re looking for.

If you tell Grandma that you installed Linux for her, the first time she tries to figure it out herself, she’s gonna search “how to change volume in Linux” on Google, and she’s going to be bombarded with a thousand answers all saying something different, most telling her to install programs, and most telling her to use the command line. Because Linux is not an operating system, it’s a family of dozens of operating systems that can each be configured thousands of different ways.

If you tell her “I installed Fedora,” she’s going to run into the same issue, but on a lesser scale. At least there’s only a few hundred different ways on a per-distro basis.

If you tell her “I installed GNOME,” she will look up “how to change volume in GNOME,” and find her answer. But now you need to explain to her the difference between the three, and when to include that information in her searches, and she will ask “why could I just say ‘how to X in Windows?’ and didn’t have to memorize 3 different names for the same thing that all give me different answers???”

And yes, your grandma will just call you to ask anyway, but what about when it’s your friend trying to figure it out at 3 am and he can’t get ahold of you?

Meanwhile, the terminal is (more or less) distro-/DE-agnostic. So their options are to learn more about how is Opperating System formed than they’ll realistically ever need to know, or use the reviled terminal. Such is the plight of DIY OSes.

I see that as full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac (is no middle click to paste).

Linux is not Windows. Stop trying to make it work like Windows. Windows is crap and I don’t want Linux to work like it.

Expecting Linux to work like Windows is how new people get frustrated. Have you heard anyone say that macOS needs to be like Windows to succeed? Of course not. So stop saying that about Linux.

Also, “no middle-click to paste” is astonishingly stupid, I’ve been using it hundreds of times per day for way over a decade now. It’s one of the most useful and helpful features I’ve ever used.

you’ll become comfortable with the cli, it’s seriously not hard.

all you need to know to start is:

• ls (list files)
• cd (change directory)
• nano (edit text file)

then you can branch out from there

OpenSUSE has YaST which allows for more GUI customisation than some other distros. Might be worth seeing if that is what you are interested in.

Even on Windows and macOS you will have to use the command line for some tasks sooner or later.

Elementary OS

Plain old Fedora works great. My mom uses it and is fine with just the app store.

Been in and out of Linux since 2006.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon DE is the only distro I’ve ever used that worked flawlessly for everything without needing to use the terminal at all. It worked so well it was boring. It’s the only distro I would recommend to a lay person

full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac

You want Windows or Mac.

If you want a computer that you can do stuff like web-browsing, document/spreadsheet/pdf/slideshow editing/creation, gaming, or multimedia processing on, there are distros and utilities on Linux that make those more-or-less easy and beginner-friendly,

BUT it requires divesting oneself of the habits, behaviors, and paradigms of other operating systems and being willing to learn anew. Community-based Libre software is developed in an entirely different way for an entirely different purpose; because of that, it is nearly impossible to recreate the same software as for-profit proprietary software. One is made by a community hacking together a functional system that suits their needs, the other is made to generate revenue, and thus has to keep users dependent on it by trapping them in dark patterns and igorance of its workings.

If you just want “Mac or Windows, but free as in beer,” suck it up, pay the devil his due, and buy one of those OSes. Libre Software is an entirely different paradigm, and thus requires a whole paradigm shift before anyone will be happy with it; on-boarding people who aren’t ready to divest themselves of the old paradigm just leads to disgruntled users who blame you for anything wrong with their PC, and creates a market void in the FOSS community ready to be filled by corpo proprietary slopware.

Getting hung up on feature parity with Windows and Mac is both a waste of time and literally impossible given the major differences between those two UIs. KDE already does most of that legwork anyway, and you can disable middle click paste easily.

IMO your time would be best spent making GUI tooling that doesn’t already exist. Identify a pain point for you that forces you to the terminal and start there.

The distro shouldn’t matter too much, but the desktop environment will.

I recommend using KDE if you want something similar to Windows, and GNOME if you want something similar to macOS.

Using a GUI also isn’t really dependent on the DE either for most programs. It’s dependent on whether or not a GUI for it exists in the first place.

Is MacOs “absolutely no cli”? It wasn’t when I was using it (admittedly, some 10yrs ago), except maybe for the basic things which any mainstream linux distro also provides.

What about Windows? Back in the day I would have paid to have a semi-decent CLI instead of being forced to use regedit (I hear regedit is still going strong, but I’ve not touched windows for an even longer period than MacOs)