I would dare say the “average person”, as in, Windows refugee, probably doesn’t want to tinker, they do want things to just kinda work as expected and just want freedom and options.
I don’t see why Zorin couldn’t be a valid jumping off point for new users to get their feet wet. As much as I love more tinkery distros, I will usually onboard somebody with something like Mint because it’s just familiar enough but still lets you explore the how and why, without requiring it.
I didn’t say “average person” and end the sentence. I said the average person installing linux. The type of person who installs Linux in the first place is already extremely far from average.
I would consider act of installing Linux itself to be “tinkering”.
I feel like I’m an average person, and making the OS look nice is very high on my wish list. My day 1 task on a new system is to copy over my backgrounds, set up themes and colours, set up the right level of transparency.
I’m only half annoyed that I did all that on bazzite before I discovered I couldn’t stand an immutable system
If I wanted an “easy” Linux distro to do things like run a home server and media storage - I mean, it sounds perfect for that??? With kids, I don’t have TIME to tinker with OS stuff anymore, I just need something that works and is more stable than Windows.
The best news is that most distros would be good for those kinds of tasks! :D
I can’t personally speak to Zorin, although it looks fine! People say it comes with lots of stuff out of the box. Worth trying out!
Mint is really user friendly with an excellent forum and tons of support. The Cinnamon desktop environment is very Windows-esque in a usability way, and it tends to be slow to adopt new features that could break things, so by the time you update, most things should be fixed.
It doesn’t require terminal usage at all, but I started to enjoy using it because it makes “computing” feel really fun. :)
For a home media server that’d be running all the time that can be a little bit of a hobby…(But a rewarding one!)
In depth to avoid more downvotes for my ADHD lol.
Definitely hit up online communities too, like searching for “selfhosted” here on lemmy! That’s where you start learning to run stuff like Jellyfin for watching your movies and such.
BUT… for starters: You could totally just share SAMBA shared folders off any Linux machine if you wanted. Boom, technically a file server. Pretty sure this is easy in Mint with GUI.
For a more dedicated “headless server” system for this, I’d look into Open Media Vault
The important takeaway is that starting is really simple. Just be patient and try things, and make sure your data is always backed up.
Before you install anything bare metal, both have a “Live USB” feature where you can see how they’d be on your system without actually installing anything.
I would dare say the “average person”, as in, Windows refugee, probably doesn’t want to tinker, they do want things to just kinda work as expected and just want freedom and options.
I don’t see why Zorin couldn’t be a valid jumping off point for new users to get their feet wet. As much as I love more tinkery distros, I will usually onboard somebody with something like Mint because it’s just familiar enough but still lets you explore the how and why, without requiring it.
I didn’t say “average person” and end the sentence. I said the average person installing linux. The type of person who installs Linux in the first place is already extremely far from average.
I would consider act of installing Linux itself to be “tinkering”.
I feel like I’m an average person, and making the OS look nice is very high on my wish list. My day 1 task on a new system is to copy over my backgrounds, set up themes and colours, set up the right level of transparency.
I’m only half annoyed that I did all that on bazzite before I discovered I couldn’t stand an immutable system
If I wanted an “easy” Linux distro to do things like run a home server and media storage - I mean, it sounds perfect for that??? With kids, I don’t have TIME to tinker with OS stuff anymore, I just need something that works and is more stable than Windows.
The best news is that most distros would be good for those kinds of tasks! :D
I can’t personally speak to Zorin, although it looks fine! People say it comes with lots of stuff out of the box. Worth trying out!
Mint is really user friendly with an excellent forum and tons of support. The Cinnamon desktop environment is very Windows-esque in a usability way, and it tends to be slow to adopt new features that could break things, so by the time you update, most things should be fixed.
It doesn’t require terminal usage at all, but I started to enjoy using it because it makes “computing” feel really fun. :)
For a home media server that’d be running all the time that can be a little bit of a hobby…(But a rewarding one!)
In depth to avoid more downvotes for my ADHD lol.
Definitely hit up online communities too, like searching for “selfhosted” here on lemmy! That’s where you start learning to run stuff like Jellyfin for watching your movies and such.
BUT… for starters: You could totally just share SAMBA shared folders off any Linux machine if you wanted. Boom, technically a file server. Pretty sure this is easy in Mint with GUI.
For a more dedicated “headless server” system for this, I’d look into Open Media Vault
The important takeaway is that starting is really simple. Just be patient and try things, and make sure your data is always backed up.
Before you install anything bare metal, both have a “Live USB” feature where you can see how they’d be on your system without actually installing anything.
Sorry for the long reply!