A friend of someone related doesn’t have a laptop nowadays, but needs one. Now we have 2 old laptops at home, and we want to give her one so she can do some things on it. Since she isn’t used to laptops and the old laptops wouldn’t run a Windows 11 (I don’t want to install a Win10 because of end of support and lacking security features), I guess installing a simple Linux is fine. Now comes the big question: Which Linux distro should I install? (see requirements below)
Laptops:
- Acer Aspire ES 15, AMD dual-core E1-7010 @1.5 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1000 GB HDD
- HP Pavilion 17-e030ez, Intel Pentium @2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM, 10000 GB HDD (I’d choose this)
Tasks:
- Office Stuff (I thought about OnlyOffice)
- Internet surfing
- Banking via Web
Requirements:
- needs to have full German support
- needs an easy software installation center
- should be easy to learn
- optionally, her friends (which probably use Windows/ Mac) should be able to help her (since she never had a laptop before)
- eventually German forum/ German Guides
I’m using Linux/ Manjaro for myself but don’t have any experience with beginner-friendly distros. I used a KDE neon for some time and also have used Ubuntu, and to be honest, they seem beginner-friendly too.
Please let me know your opinions, thanks!
Forget web browsing with 4GB RAM. You can completely disregard the comments recommending a “lite DE” when merely opening a modern web site will put the whole PC into crawling. The 150 MB more or less for different desktops are completely irrelevant then.
The best “newbie friendly” distribution is just plain Fedora Workstation but with only 4GB RAM it will be a pain to use no matter what.
Edit: If you’re a KDE user yourself, you’re best equipped to answer KDE-related questions.
…if you don’t install an ad-blocker and open many tabs at the same time…
I think 4GB is plenty for web browsing if there are not many tabs opened. Though the laptop will still be slow because of the specs.