Honestly, for newcomers the options should be Mint or Zorin, any buntu variant except Ubuntu itself, Debian and Fedora. Desktops should be limited to KDE or Gnome, maybe Cinnamon or XFCE for older hardware.
But I'm partial on Fedora. It's known for being a little cutting edge and having some problems. That and proprietary codecs aren't installed apparently with the installer. Instead I'd go with OpenSUSE. Same packaging system, but with extra quality of life features and more stability.
lol ! I can't even write a comment without contradicting myself hahahahahaha
Zorin's not gonna have AI tools. This is Ubuntu specific. Zorin is BASED on Ubuntu, much like Mint is. But their software distribution is independent. So I think you're worried for nothing.
I wouldn't even be surprised if the Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie might not even have AI tools in there either. They're not Canonical projects. Their respective teams have control over their distributions. Not Canonical.
I appreciate your feedback. But here are my counter arguments 😉
Nobara and Bazzite are very niche.
Nobara is a personal project that's provided to the greater public that gained in popularity. But what happens if G.E. decides to stop working on it? If he suddenly becomes disabled or dies? Maybe someone else will pick it up, maybe not.
Bazzite is even worse because it is heavily gaming focused. I tried it and it had way too much gaming stuff that I didn't really need or asked for out of the box. And I really hate the idea of an atomic distro. I've tried it and hated it. I'd recommend it for anyone wanting to use a gaming device like the Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally X, Lenovo Legion GO or something similar. But for a PC as a desktop workstation I think it's a bad idea. I don't want to have to go mess around config files only to install software or system components that doesn't come as a flatpak. And that would be a terrible suggestion for a first time Linux user for personal and working laptop used mainly for editing documents, browsing the web, streaming movies, doing video conference calls and the occasional game.
Now I'm not shitting on these distros. I think they're amazing at what they do. I'd heavily consider Bazzite if I bought a gaming device or Nobara for a gaming box. But they're not adapted for a standard desktop PC where you're only trying to find a Windows alternative that gets out of your way.
Zorin has great hardware support out of the box. Our PCs are already a few years old now and we don't have fancy gaming hardware. Heck all my gaming devices were recognized and worked right away with Kubuntu 24.04. I never had issues with Nvidia either. All my games worked great also. And with Zorin being Ubuntu based, I doubt there will be any issue there. And about your concerns regarding the updates breaking the extensions and stuff in Gnome, the extensions provided with Zorin are developed and maintained by the Zorin dev team. So I'm expecting them to ensure they work from one version to the next. Much like Canonical have been doing with their customizations in their default Ubuntu desktop.
I agree KDE is more Windows-like. Kubuntu was my 3rd choice actually. It's what I've been using for ages. Snaps won't be an issue for her. I think I can pretty much disable snaps without causing too much harm to the system. But I want to give Zorin a shot. KDE might have too much customization and it might end up being a turn off. Zorin might be just right in that regard.
Anyway, we'll see. And thanks again for your feedback and recommendations! :)
I understand you completely. But I'm gong to wait and see. Reading from their announcement, sure they are enabling AI, but as I said, AI is not all bad.
Let's just say Canonical is providing the hammer, but how it's used depends on the user itself. It could be used for building great stuff, or used to destroy things.
It looks to me like they're adding AI tools that you run locally. That doesn't seem like such a bad idea. And their LLMs are going to be open source. That's not bad at all.
People think AI = bad. But it's not inherently bad. It's the companies behind it that are bad.
There's nothing wrong with using AI to solve complex problems. It's when the companies exploits copyrighted material to train their AI or use sloppy data like reddit or block certain topics or introduce a political bias that's problematic.
This is stupid. That's not how Linux is supposed to work. That's not the Unix way of doing things. This needs to stop unless we end up with another Windows. Then I'll switch to BSD dammit!
I've been using it since I started using Linux 26 years ago until Ubuntu switched to upstart and then systemD.
It did the job and was very easy to work with. I knew what the scripts did and I could write my own. And it didn't ask for a date of birth either.