Have not seen suggested alternatives?

Dinit? OpenRC? Runit? S6? SysVinit? InitWare?

Not many seem to know the last one.

https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare

There are more.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

Are you aware that Red Hat alone makes billions of dollars per year off Linux?

The FSF approach the microcode is just brain dead.

Most Wayland compositors don not have the concept of multiple windows being one application. And you cannot always control how and where they appear.

This is not a Wayland complaint. Just pointing out that old GIMP was just not very compatible with the core Design of Wayland.

Depending on what compositor you use, a lot of this has really improved.

The biggest “Linux” skill would be package management. It is one of the biggest differences.

Most of the rest of the advice here stems from desktop environment choice.

It depends on the distro and how it feels about shipping non-free software. Fedora, as an example, still ships without them.

Good thing GIMP went single window before Wayland popularity spiked.

Pretty harsh response given that a proper shape tool, and specifically the ability to draw a circle, is on the GIMP roadmap.

I do not think it is the most essential functionality but even the project sees it as missing.

Text has gotten a lot better in recent versions. It could still be better.

It is just a computer. Don’t let us nerds intimidate you. Use what you are comfortable with.

That said, you could dual boot or even just boot of a USB stick into a live Linux session. That will let you play with it and decide if it is as scary as you feared.

Linux Mint can be written to USB and booted into a live Linux session I believe.

Microsoft will for sure benefit here.

Many users, especially businesses, will simply upgrade.

Some will pay for the ESU.

Some will sign up for cloud backups.

All these benefit Microsoft.

Some fairly small number will work around Microsoft’s plan by upgrading Windows 11 where they are not supposed to or finding a way to get the updates for free.

Sure, probably the biggest fraction of users will probably do nothing. But they were already doing nothing for Microsoft so nothing changes in this case. Of anything, the load in Microsoft servers goes down a bit.

So ya, Microsoft has little incentive not to charge ahead.

I understand your frustration. And I agree that choice is an impediment to adoption.

That said, I am not that comment deserved your reply.

As far as I can tell, the OP was only offering one option—Debian. So your concern does not apply there.

And the next comment did not suggest having more options or adding confusing choices either. I think they were ok with offering just one distro. They just wanted to know why the single recommendation was not Mint.

He was not asking a new user why they chose Debian. He was asking the Linux expert why he chose Debian over Mint. Your comment does not seem to apply.

There is nothing wrong with Debian so I certainly think it is an acceptable choice. That said, Mint probably would offer a less jarring transition than Debian for Windows users. Mint defaults to Cinnamon (very Windows like). Debian defaults to GNOME (a less familiar desktop metaphor). Mint also comes with just a few extra tools and touches that can keep new users off the command line (unless they want to go there).

And if you like Debian, LMDE gives you Debian with the Mint GUI and tools.

Honestly, it seems like a fair question.

If you are only going to give them one option, why not one more likely to work for them? Them being everyday Windows users.

And all that said…I do agree that keeping it simple is the most important thing and offering a single recommendation is the right strategy regardless of which distro you choose to recommend.

The crazy thing is that Windows 11 may feel more foreign than Linux Mint would have. It depends what he uses his computer for. My guess is the web and maybe printing.

Believe it not, Steam even works on RHEL if you use Flatpak.

But you are probably going to want to go for something a bit more current. Fedora or Bazzite may work for you as they use the same core layout and userland as RHEL. Fedora is the test bed for the ideas that go into CentOS that becomes RHEL.

Put Linux on one of those spare hard drives and simply mount the existing drive as a second drive in Linux.

This will give you access to all your current files from within Linux without having to do anything. Move over what you want and need as you use Linux. At some point, you will probably want to reformat the original Windows drive for extra space. You could consider mounting it as /home at that point.

Choosing a distro is a matter of taste. I can tell you though that I have moved a few Windows users to Linux Mint and they are all happy with it. My last one was LMDE (Mint with a Debian base).

Thanks! I had to stare at your link for a bit to spot the exceptions. There are not many exceptions but they are important ones.

Good to see Ubuntu being pragmatic about it. I imagine they hope to ship the remaining Uutils versions before 26.04.

Debian is still a problem

Most distros do not require the extra repos. For Debian though, you do. The ones shipped with the distro, even Debian 13, are too old and have problems.

Not sure why you would have so much trouble with a DKMS module in Arch. But having to manage out-of-tree modules is an issue. Thankfully NVIDIA does not have that issue anymore as they now use in-tree modules (as of driver release 580). Arch is shipping those drivers now so others will not experience your pain.

Debian ships really old drivers. So NVDiA problems should still be expected on Debian, especially on Wayland.

problems with running Arch in VMs

I do not see what that has to do with NVIDIA. Sounds like you may have just had issues with Arch.

Two pretty massive facts for anybody trying to answer this question:

1. Since driver version 555, explicit sync has been supported. This makes a massive difference to the experience on Wayland. Most of the problems people report are for drivers earlier than this (eg. black screens and flicker).

2. Since driver version 580, NVIDIA uses Open Source modules to interact with the kernel. These are not Open Source drivers. They are the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA that should now “just work” across kernel upgrades (like AMD has forever). This solves perhaps the biggest hassle of dealing with NVIDIA on Linux.

Whether you get to enjoy these significant improvements depends on how long it takes stuff to make it to your distribution. If you are on Arch, you have this stuff today. If you are on Debian, you are still waiting (even on Debian 13).

This is not an endorsement of either distro. They are simply examples of the two extremes regarding how current the software versions are in those distros. Most other distros fall somewhere in the middle.

All this stuff will make it to all Linux users eventually. They are solved problems. Just not solved for everyone.