If you like fedora as a base, you can install the Gnome version of fedora and install the Pop Shell. It has autotiling that you can turn on and off while you get used to it if you want. Its what I run on Nobara and it works perfectly fine for me.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

Maybe not that much more complicated, but it does give a less experienced user a lot more opportunities to make a mistake that could result in data loss or just a computer that suddenly decides not to boot Linux anymore since a Windows update broke grub.

The most important thing to do is backup your data to an external drive. Unless you are planning on dual booting (much more complicated) you will be wiping out the entire drive that has windows on it when you install Linux.

This guide goes through the whole installation process.

Mine is usually sheer horror at the prospect of getting that far and screwing up on an international stage. Secondhand anxiety is in the red zone.

Can, yes.

Should, maybe.

Enjoy doing, unlikely.

And for sure your home isp has all the email ports blocked upstream.

With all that being said, to call SMTP dead is wildly insane. I do figure it will die someday though. Probably around the same time of universal IPV6 adoption during the year of the linux desktop.

I haven’t done any work for the military but i can say that all the legacy systems I’ve worked on were because the specific software they need was written only for Windows 98 and the developer or company that created it is long gone. Keeping it going is a chore but switching to literally anything else is out of the question.

I could see for military applications that having the known quantity of a working piece of software that isn’t changing anymore and can be swapped as an entire unit is an advantage, especially if it doesn’t touch the internet in any capacity. But eventually you run out of people who know what to do if any changes need to be made.

There are several things like that in Fedora, which is already a good reason not to recommend it to first timers. They most likely won’t know or care about nonfree codecs, they will just see a broken machine. Linux Mint understands that as a use case and has a “magic make it work” checkbox during install.

That all being said, I run Nobara and love it, but i wouldn’t recommend it for new people.

They would most likely still have to disable secure boot.

That would lower the barrier to entry significantly. It doesn’t address the issues with the bios but someone mildly adventurous would have a much easier time going forward.

I think something like that would have to be sponsored by and maintained by a big distro though. I’m afraid if it was a community effort the amount of bikeshedding would stop it before it even began.

Linux pre installed is the only way for most people to use it I’m afraid.

Fedora does btrfs snapshots on boot also, which is such a great feature that I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t copied it for Windows.

This is definitely the case. And by the time someone is willing to experiment with their PC its so old that the experience with Linux is hampered by the older hardware.

Definitely. I can genuinely say that the autotiling in PopOS completely changed my workflow for the better.

Absolutely. If Linux was pre installed that’s what people would use. Its the switching to Linux from something else that proves so complicated.

Mostly just so they know which boot device to pick.

Admittedly that’s probably not necessary or the least of someone’s issues.

God i wish. And most everyone here could install a new operating system in about 20 minutes. But nobody else is going to because the learning curve for a regular user to install an os is basically perpendicular. Even if they had a linux installer already on a flash drive.

Oh just boot into the bios and find the option to boot for a flash drive and then boom installed.

Which requires a user to know, What a bios is

What booting means

What boot options mean

What the model of their flash drive is

What button on their keyboard they need to press to get to the bios

What secure boot is

Where they need to go to turn off secure boot

How and where to back up their important files

What a disk partition is

How to reverse the changes made to the bios so that it doesn’t boot to usb by default.

And that’s assuming they know why they want a different OS, why they care and that they know about Linux in the first place.

Most people dont and never will. All you can do is install Linux for the ones you like the most and say a prayer to your favorite deity for the rest.

This seems like it might be a perfect use case for Tailscale. The open source version of the control plane is called Headscale but you’d have to host it in a vps somewhere if you wanted to use it.

I can’t wait. As long as they keep the autotiling feature working as well as it does now I’m down.

This is pretty much my setup anyway. I run Pop Shell on top of Fedora and add dash to dock.

I’m just absolutely hooked on the autotiling built into pop shell.

If its an official spin all the better.