If you happen to have a tutorial on this let me know. I tried installing my Canon photo printing software in Bottles but it could never find the printer spool.
Yeah it was either Mint or Zorin and maybe Kubuntu, but the Snaps are a concern in 26.04. (Though Zorin has them too so... But they're not as rooted into the OS as with *buntus)
I'm not considering fedora though. I rather stick with a Debian-based distro. I'm just more used to it and it'll be easier for me to troubleshoot if trouble comes.
Thanks. I understand the concern. I don't think the Snaps are going to be a big deal for her. As long as she understands not to install Snap apps unless strictly necessary. (And she won't need to from the list of software she uses.)
I thought about getting her Debian with KDE. That's probably what I'm going to do with my own PC as I want to avoid Kubuntu 26.04 and their forced snaps. (They're a concern for me though lol)
I looked at Pika and Nobara. She doesn't want a gaming focused OS. They're also pretty niche and might not last long, relatively speaking. I mean Nobara is one guy (Glorious Eggroll) and PikaOS is very new and is also based on Sid (testing, unstable) which can potentially come with it's loads of problems.
She's new to Linux. It was either Mint or Zorin. I went with Zorin for the desktop experience that's loads more polished with great features. Mint seems a bit old in comparison and I find the look isn't really consistent throughout. It lacks some customization features as well.
EDIT: On second thought, maybe this Pika OS is right for me though. I'm a power user and I use my PC for gaming a lot, and I'm used to Debian. And Sid, honestly, is still far more stable that Arch while still being a rolling release with somewhat recent packages. Set up with BTRFS snapshots in case something breasks... This might be the right thing for me.
EDIT2: Ok so here's an interesting message during installation:
2- This is a hobby distribution, so we will try our best to provide format support but it will -NOT- be guaranteed.
This means nobody should recommend PikaOS to anybody, unless they really know what the hell they're doing. And they shouldn't expect a lot from this distro.
For a long term distro that you're going to use for years, this is a terrible idea.
Oh but I looked it up as I was typing this and the latest Mint is still on KDE Plasma 5 when the latest is 6. Even Debian 26.04 has KDE Plasma 6 now. Mint 23 is coming out in December.
I'll need to update before then as 25.10 will hit end of life this month.
Some people just want their OS to get out of their way. That's what Zorin does.
That's what I liked about Kubuntu. Install it and forget it. You barely have to do anything and you forget you're running Linux at all while you get all your work and play done. I don't have time to mess around with some configs to modify my atomic installation and what not. I just open the software center and install whatever the heck I need. And if the Flatpak doesn't work, I can install from the deb instead.
But now that Snaps are becoming mandatory for core features, I'm going to go the Debian route.
Yeah, Debian is my OS of choice honestly. Rock solid and very stable and secure thanks to the thorough testing the packages go through. Yeah the software is older, but it's worth it in terms of time saved.
And like you said, there's TONS of 3rd party support for it.
That's the ONLY thing preventing me from installing it on my own PC honestly. I absolutely love how they customized Gnome and the many QoL features they added.
I'm currently using Kubuntu 25.10 on my own PC and need to switch because I don't want Ubuntu's 26.04 with forced Snaps for core features of the OS. I think that's bullshit. I love KDE and how close to Windows the experience is and how much you can customize it. But I miss the GNOME simplicity sometimes. Gnome 2 was perfect. Switched to MATE when Ubuntu started shipping with Gnome 3 and that held for a while. Then I moved to KDE Plasma once it evolved from the bug-riddled, resource-heavy mess KDE Plasma 4 was when it came out. And I've stuck with that since.
Honestly now I'm considering just installing Debian Trixie with KDE and call it a day. I'm used to it now and I don't want to spend weeks customizing my Gnome shell with a million extensions that might break at the next update.
I had 2 smartphones for one job and I hated it. Had to carry 2 devices everywhere. What a pain in the butt that was. Now you can have a separate work profile that you can shut off at a press of a button which is great.
She's mostly editing excel sheets, word documents, powerpoint presentations, using outlook, and maybe Zoom and Teams for chat & meetings. It's not worth it.
It also means more techno junk that'll end up in landfills, too.
No. Bazzite is a gaming-focused RedHat based atomic distro. She doesn't want a Steam machine. She wants a workstation. One that she will understand how it works without having to explain to her what the fuck an atomic OS and containerization is. It's a terrible choice for her.
Zorin OS is far from being a niche Ubuntu derivative. I don't know where you got that idea. Drauger OS is a niche derivative. Ubuntu Budgie is a niche derivative. But Zorin OS is a solid competitor to Linux Mint and is one of the fastest growing distros in terms of users. I don't consider that a niche distro at all.
Heck Bazzite is as niche a distro as it can get. It targets very specific users with very specific purposes with a very specific non-standard way of doing things. C'mon man.
Bazzite might be fine for YOUR specific needs. But you should consider that different people have different needs.
She'd prefer to use Linux than Windows 11.
Microsoft products aren't an issue anymore in Linux.