Hey, so my friend asked me which distro i can recommend for him. He basically used Windows his whole life. The recent developments of Microsoft though seems to worry him, so he want to give Linux a try.
I myself use Linux since around one year, so i’m definitely far from being an expert and i don’t really feel i have enough expertise to give him an appropriate answer. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and love it, but i suppose it’s not a good distro for him since he is not that tech affine and i suppose getting used to the terminal is a bit much too ask and could scare him away from the Linux experience.
So what im looking for is a distro, that is easy to use (for beginners & non techies; also not a rolling release) but is also good for Gaming (NVIDIA) and lightly everyday stuff. He uses his computer only for free time, not for his work.
I hope some people here have some helpful recommendations. I was thinking of maybe recommend Mint or Ubuntu, but i only used Ubuntu for a few days and don’t really know much about it.
Bear in mind that most of what is written above also applies to PopOS - except for the desktop environment being Gnome 3’s “Mac-like” rather than Cinnamon’s “Windows-Like”. There’s a few cool little adjustments to both, but this preference may have the biggest impact.
You can always test a “Live USB” of both, which allows you to load the OS directly from a USB stick, without installing anything - to test which seems right (and the same applies to any other distro anyone mentions in the thread). I’m pretty sure a ten minute test of each would give a sufficient amount of “Hmm, that’s cool” / “Huh, that’s weird” to help things along :)