Say a friend is looking for a new system, and said person is not particularly savvy with technology, what system would you point them toward?
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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If they won't be doing any modern gaming (like 2025/6 new releases), then Linux Mint.
If they want to do modern gaming, I highly recommend Fedora (KDE Spin for most, GNOME if you really like Mac's UX).
If you want to do mostly gaming only (not heavy work, dedicated gaming setup), then Bazzite which is a downstream of Fedora.
Mint is a bit easier for a new user, but Fedora arguably gives you the latest Linux has to offer at excellent stability. They also have some nice defaults like BTRFS, zswap, SElinux that you don't have to worry about configuring manually in any way.
EDIT:
I should add that you probably shouldn't listen to the average random youtube video on this topic, because a metric ton of them fail to highlight the issues of many distros, desktop environments, software, etc because they provide a dumb tier list based off of their personal interests or something that they read from each distro's description without actually taking the time to thoroughly test.
ZorinOS is not a real answer just because they advertise parity with Windows. There are plenty of distros that achieve the same thing, better, and for free.
The best thing about linux is that you can try it out first without installing. Really play around with it and make sure it suits what you want.
I've been using Zorin for a couple of years and recently installed it on my desktop. It's free.