5mo ago

Which Linux distro for beginners (with requirements)

A friend of someone related doesn't have a laptop nowadays, but needs one. Now we have 2 old laptops at home, and we want to give her one so she can do some things on it. Since she isn't used to laptops and the old laptops wouldn't run a Windows 11 (I don't want to install a Win10 because of end of support and lacking security features), I guess installing a simple Linux is fine. Now comes the big question: Which Linux distro should I install? (see requirements below)

Laptops:

Acer Aspire ES 15, AMD dual-core E1-7010 @1.5 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1000 GB HDD
HP Pavilion 17-e030ez, Intel Pentium @2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM, 10000 GB HDD (I'd choose this)

Tasks:

Office Stuff (I thought about OnlyOffice)
Internet surfing
Banking via Web

Requirements:

needs to have full German support
needs an easy software installation center
should be easy to learn
optionally, her friends (which probably use Windows/ Mac) should be able to help her (since she never had a laptop before)
eventually German forum/ German Guides

I'm using Linux/ Manjaro for myself but don't have any experience with beginner-friendly distros. I used a KDE neon for some time and also have used Ubuntu, and to be honest, they seem beginner-friendly too.

Please let me know your opinions, thanks!

24 comments

Regarding Specs, I'd choose a lite DE.
Xubuntu
Linux Mint with Mate or Xfce
You can even use an LTS version for longer lasting editions.
- Linux Mint with Mate +1
  Linux in general has good language support.
  
  Linux in general has good language support.
  I've yet to find a distro with NZ English 😆. I'd love to just start a new dictionary and add words to it for all the spell checks, but I've never worked out how to do this. I'm not sure there's even system level spell check.

There are lots of choices, but personally I would go with Linux Mint as something likely familiar and packaged with pretty much all the basics for the use case you outlined.

That's a pretty weak machine. Linux Mint is my #1 recommendation for new Linux users, especially former Windows users. It's what I moved my parents to on their very old computer and it works great.
Try the default Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop first, but if it seems really slow, go with the XFCE version.
You really need to use an SSD in that laptop if possible, it will speed things up to a usable level. Also, if the RAM is upgradable, you should put 8GB minimum in it. DDR3 laptop sticks are dirt cheap, you can get them online for $20-$30 for 8GB sticks.
Same with SSDs, get a 1000GB brand new SSD for $50-$60, it will make everything much more responsive.
- Yeah, it's an old laptop. She doesn't have much money for a new laptop and since she won't use it often, it's enough to check mail, e-banking, ... And we have some old laptops at home nobody uses, so we thought we could give it to her as a gift.
  Eventually, she'll buy a new ~400$ laptop later with some good specs but that's not in the next few months. But thanks for the tips.
  
  On my living room setup hooked up to a projector:
  mint xfce
  sff tower
  dual core
  only 3GB ddr2. (One slot fried) 1080p via display port to HDMI 1tb HDD Use 2 VPN. An sshd server Myriad physical issues. Old as fuck BIOS.
  (Was released in 2009 or 2011?)
  Memory is a bit of a pain sometimes. Mostly Firefox needs to be closed and reopened after system sleep.
  I can watch 4 football games in HD with no real issue.
  It is tweaked to high heaven in kernal and configs.
  As long as it can work I will make it work.

Anything will be fine. I’d try a xfce/lxqt desktop, but even on old dual cores the newest kde is good.
Everyone says mint, but suse has a huge German community because it’s from Germany.
Another person said you should upgrade to ssd and maybe add more ram, and I agree with them. Usually I spend $40 to do that to laptops and it makes real dogs run great.
Post the model numbers on the bottom of the laptops and I can give some pre-gifting upgrade advice with actionable links. Both seem to take 2.5” sata ssds so that’s good and cheap, but there’s different models of the aspire es-15 which take different memory sizes.
If you do take the cheap ssd replacement route, give them one of those usb hdd enclosures with the old big rotational hdd in there. They’re like seven bucks and it means they have a place to hold a backup of their data if the gift laptop dies.

Linux Mint for sure.
It's more welcoming to newbies than even Windows.

I'd also recommend Mint with Mate or Xfce. They have a German forum too.

New user that didn't exactly choose to try Linux, I'd go with Ubuntu or Mint just for the sake of being compatible with pretty much anything you'd find when looking up "how to X on Linux". On those specs I guess I'd go Xubuntu or Mint Xfce edition.
I'd try a few Wayland compositors and X11 WMs on the thing and see what performs the best. Depending on the graphics situation and drivers, Wayland can be faster or slower. At this vintage I'd guess the best will be Xorg with no compositor at all, just plain 2D acceleration, but sometimes even the crappiest OpenGL can be surprising.
If you put Waydroid on it, it'll also double as a shitty Android tablet. Almost all bank apps will refuse to run because it's not a certified device, but it will be some common interface their friends are more likely to be able to help with.
I guess there's also the option of just installing ChromeOS on it.

Fedora.
Opensuse Tumbleweed.

I have similarly basic needs, and I stopped distro-hopping when I found Q4OS a few years ago. It seems to run well on most hardware and, while I can't speak as to how well-supported it is in German, its community is based in Germany.

I put antiX on a 2 Gb HP 1 x core Atom a little while ago. It's used for notetaking at meetings with LibreOffice, internet browsing through wifi. Not particularly heavy usage but it runs suprisingly well. As your hardware is a bit restricted, perhaps try that. Edit: spelling

Pop! Os
Imo.

Internet surfing
Forget web browsing with 4GB RAM. You can completely disregard the comments recommending a "lite DE" when merely opening a modern web site will put the whole PC into crawling. The 150 MB more or less for different desktops are completely irrelevant then.
The best "newbie friendly" distribution is just plain Fedora Workstation but with only 4GB RAM it will be a pain to use no matter what.
Edit: If you're a KDE user yourself, you're best equipped to answer KDE-related questions.
- I think 4GB is plenty for web browsing if there are not many tabs opened. Though the laptop will still be slow because of the specs.
- Forget web browsing with 4GB RAM.
  ...if you don't install an ad-blocker and open many tabs at the same time...
- There are several browsers that can operate with low memory requirements, but you have to be willing to live without JavScript & the front-end needs to have been built with accessibility & progressive enhancement in mind. …Which most front-end developers don’t do & the industry doesn’t normally pay them enough to care or get better results (& following YouTube tutorials always tells you to use the latest bloated framework which is overkill for your project).
  Also Fedora doesn’t ship with LTS kernels which makes me question their package management strategy.
- I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and it works fine, my fedora i3 installation. It's nothing compared to a proper computer but it's not like I ever run out of RAM either. (Generally I open two Firefox windows, discord and vscode)

24 comments