Linux

Zorin is user friendly. You may still need to use a password for doing updates.

If you game, then probably Bazzite.

If you hate the command line you could try tumbleweed, you will have Yast2 GUI apps for everything yo want to alter on the system. And it has automatic snapshotting if out you mess things up, you can boot to a previous snapshot. Howeverits will require a password whenever you want to make system changes. And a learning curve compared to other distros.

Not really getting away from typing a password, that's the part that can keep malicious stuff out because it doesn't have permission.

Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they're allergic to the terminal and they're getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I'm biased here because I'm a techy person but I've used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to "just reinstall or restore from a system restore point" which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.

I’d suggest you don’t listen to anyone in this thread and don’t switch.

You don’t want to learn how to use linux, you want to keep using windows and you’re trying to do something about it now because the clock has run out on you. Go to massgrave.dev/windows10_eol and follow the instructions to get esu updates for three years or do an in place switch to iot ltsc 2021 and get updates for eight years.

During those years, branch out a little and try using a mac or linux on their own terms. Neither will be an easy switch, you’ll have to retrain your muscle memory and you will absolutely have to learn to use the terminal if you wanna use linux but especially if you have someone who can help you in person, you can easily get switched over.

+1 for Bazzite (or another one from https://universal-blue.org/ ), very hard to destroy, if an update breaks something just choose old install during boot and wait a few weeks before trying again. I am kinda savvy but don't really need (or can 😸) tinker with the system.

Where are you based? Maybe someone from https://endof10.org/ or another local hacker grouo could help you in person. There are regular install parties in my city.

I'd like to know a bit more about your troubles to answer.

Do you know what desktop you were using? If so, what did you like and what didnt you like?

Where were you reentering your password all the time? Was it logging in, logging in after the screen went dark, the wallet, etc?

What sort of troubleshooting were you doing? Was it an application not working, a piece of hardware, or something else?

The reason I'm asking these questions is because most people are interacting with just the desktop GUI, so some of your issues (password) may just be configuration, the distribution won't matter. If your troubleshooting was due to hardware, there may be a better choice.

For example, I use Debian everywhere. That said, there are times where certain pieces of software or certain pieces of hardware work better with a different distribution. On my T480, I'm using arch, mostly because of the fingerprint reader and a some things I'm building will be easier this way.

Generically speaking, it doesnt matter which distribution you use, you can do the basics on all of them. What it can come down to is familiarity, hardware, and purpose, and the guiding principles for each distribution.

One thing to keep in mind about the terminal:

In Linux, many GUI tools are simply pretty interfaces for the terminal. That's why folks tell you that you'll need the terminal occasionally, no matter what: you might need to type in commands that don't already have a friendly GUI.

The terminal isn't that scary, though! Every big distro has a support community. And if you need to do something in the terminal? Someone else has definitely needed to do the same thing, so you won't need to figure it out on your own.

I mostly use Bazzite in front of a big TV. When I first set up the computer, I needed to use the terminal to configure a couple of things related to network shares. Later, I used it to help specific devices wake up the computer from sleep. It's been months since then, and I'm not sure I've needed the terminal for anything else.

Use it as an opportunity to learn how your computer works. It's really satisfying to understand how things happen.

1. Linux is intentionally made to be modular and using the terminal is pretty much the only standard way to do things across many distributions.

I highly suggest you stop avoiding it because it will most likely be faster and easier to do something (i.e. system-level changes) with it than not.

2. If you want a hard-to-fuck-up distro, I think Atomic (at least that's what Fedora calls them) distros are the best.

Similar to smartphones or MacOS, entire OS is a singular image that is also updated all at once. Core parts of the filesystem is also read-only, meaning it is pretty much impossible to mess things up if you don't mean to do so deliberately.

The best in this regard are from uBlue project: Bazzite (most popular), Bluefin, Aurora, etc. While Bazzite is intended for gaming (things like Steam are pre-installed), the other are for general use. Bluefin uses GNOME desktop, while Aurora has KDE Plasma desktop environment. Look up their visuals and choose whichever one you like. I prefer Aurora because KDE Plasma is often much more familiar to Windows users.

3. uBlue distros don't require a password for system updates (they happen automatically in the background) and so do installing/updating programs.

You should check Mint again, things in the Linux world are improving fast lately. Some people got their grampas into Linux and they are happy using it, with your use case it can easily also be the case, the terminal it's not needed, may be sporadically and to setup some things as you like at first, like changing settings to not enter passwords, may be it's not so safe but it's not as unsafe as using Windows. Just get used to the good habit of making regular backups. In any case just make a post asking and we will be happy to help. Just go ahead and slowly you will get confidence to do more difficult things. The freedom that you experience using Linux really worth it, but it can take time to appreciate.

What's your favorite color? Pick the distro with that color in their logo.

Any one of the uBlue projects is perfect for this use case.

KDE: https://getaurora.dev/
Gnome: https://projectbluefin.io/
Gaming: https://bazzite.gg/

Install and setup once, run forever. Immutable so impossible to break for a non-tech user, no package upgrades fuck-ups because updates are atomic and don't touch the currently running system, are done in the background and are completely invisible for the user, great hardware support, based on Fedora. Regular users can only install Flatpaks through the App Store.

The only "maintenance" needed is a weekly reboot to move to the latest OS image.

As a personal feedback, I moved my gadget enthusiast but tech illiterate father on Bluefin. He can ruin a Mac in less than a few months. He can generate undocumented bugs on iOS by his mere presence. He hasn't touched the terminal in his life. But somehow, Bluefin is still running perfectly after a year and a half. That's how robust it is.

As a side note, passwords are extremely useful for basic security, and a password less life is extremely dangerous. The fact that you need to input a password tells you that you're doing something that requires extra care and attention.

If you're lucky to have a fingerprint reader that supports Linux (extremely rare unfortunately), you can get away with typing your password once at login and using your fingerprint for everything else.

As everybody suggests, you should either try Mint again or go ZorinOS. If you have problems there are dedicated communities for asking general Linux questions so feel free to ask.

https://programming.dev/c/linux4noobs

https://lemmy.zip/c/linuxquestions

Also, LLMs are very handy for trivial questions like binding PDFs together (which can be done using pdfunite FYI). Just don't blindly execute what it says, let it explain the meaning of each part of the command.

I recommend zorin os. Its an ubuntu lts (long term support) respin that is fine with proprietary software so will offer to install nvidia drivers and such if you want. This means its anything but bleeding edge and about as stable as your going to get. It tries to mimic the windows look and feel to be comfortable to windows users. Then it is also an out of the box distro which means it comes with software someone would exect a laptop to have and then some. so it will have libre office and a browser and software to play and edit audio, photos, video and software to burn a disk if you have a burner. Even an rdp client. It also has wine setup with play on linux so you can right click a windows exe and run or install it (may or may not work depending on the windows program). When you find programs online if it has a debian download you can use that or you can check a gui add software ting and search for it with the spyglass icon. Its about as easy as you will get. That being said I often recommend people install onto their last laptop if they have one that did not break when they replaced it. Linux runs so much better than windows that the old one will often run better than windows on teh new one.

I'm sure you could manage to do a lot of things without a terminal on something like Fedora or Mint, but you really should just learn to use the command line. If you're expecting it to be anything close to the windows command line it is not, it's way easier to use and you'll be able to do things so much faster than you ever could with a gui on windows. Learning everything you really need shouldn't take more than a couple hours.

The one other option I can think of is ChromeOS Flex, but even there you're going to have a way better experience if you learn to do things from the command line when appropriate

First, try LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; it is a highly maintained fork of the latter, with plenty of improvements. Another thing is, even if there are GUIs for everything, do not be afraid of using the terminal! As another commenter noted, it can even be easier. As for passwords, it is like that for security purposes; if you disable it, you'll be at a higher risk of breaking something.

When I started my Linux journey a couple of years ago, I tried lots of distros and experienced some of the same frustrations. The distro that hooked me and just worked was Pop! OS. It was very user friendly, didn't require any fiddling, it just worked. Later I wanted a more up-to-date system, and after trying several distros I settled with Fedora.

Other thoughts: ...be sure to install Timeshift (system rollback app). ...my experience is that gnome desktop is easier, cleaner, less tweaking and less overwhelming than kde.

Zorin

So, I'm gonna be a bit of a contrarian here, but my main advice is to abandon requirements 1 and 3.

As to 2, you'd be looking for an immutable or atomic distro, those are harder to fuck up.

BUT I urge you not to be afraid of the terminal, it isn't as scary as it looks! Try watching/following along with a couple "linux terminal for beginners" or "bash for beginners" videos on youtube like they're a class. They'll teach you the basics you need to be a LOT more comfortable within like an hour, and you'll be a lot better off for it. I did the same and now a few years in I prefer the terminal for many things and cringe when I have to use the windows GUI at work for something that would take seconds on linux by typing one command that amounts to a sentence. It's a very powerful and convenient tool and I reccomend not shutting yourself off from it.

No matter the distro, you're likely not going to fuck it up so bad it can't be fixed, but do be careful when using sudo in the terminal as that is when it's more likely. That said, no matter what (even if you stayed on windows), you should keep offsite backups of your most important files, things you couldn't just redownload again. That way if you do fuck up, you can always just reinstall and replace your files no problem, it's free! Sure nobody wants to take like an hour to do that, but still nothing gets lost which is the most important part.

As for not requiring a password, no. You want the password checks. Security is important, and what's more the password checks themselves can act as a "be careful this could fuck your shit up" warning. As annoying as they are, it can be a good thing!

I'm sure you'll get plenty "try this distro" responses so I'm not even going to go there, but my advice honestly applies to all distros equally.

Tl;dr: Passwords safe, terminal good actually.

You’re probably going to find that the terminal will come up at some point no matter what version of Linux you choose.

For most I would recommend Mint, but since you mentioned having a negative experience previously, perhaps Zorin OS would be a better alternative?

If you want a hardened OS that would be difficult to break, an immutable OS may be a better route for you. Here’s a link with some options to choose from. My recommendation would be Fedora Silverblue.

As someone else mentioned, you will still need to use a password when making changes to the system. You can set it to boot without a password if you prefer to. I use Bazzite (gaming focused immutable OS; based on Fedora Silverblue) and I want to say 90% of the time I only need my password at boot.

If you need office apps, LibreOffice and Open Office should do what you need. MS office can be a challenge to get running, but the online web versions will run out of the box.

Hope that helps!

For these requirements, I'd recommend PopOS. Thanks to its app centre being very well designed, you never need to touch the terminal for anything. Package managers are apt and Flatpak, so you get full access to basically anything that GNU/Linux has to offer. The install itself is super easy as well. I think it may be one of the best beginner distros.

try out Zorin OS

It looks like you want SteamOS. I recommend either getting a Steam Deck, wait for the Steam Machine or install it compatible hardware if you have any. No Nvidia GPUs.

SteamOS checks all three requirements for the most part, maybe 3 not so much. But it will be near impossible to fuck it up as it has a read-only filesystem and all apps are installed through flatpak which are sandboxed similar to apps on iOS.

if that's all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else... any mainstream distribution will work.

fedora's 'atomic' distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.

silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.

Like some already said, how long ago is "a few years ago"? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.

I haven't tried Bazzite, but I've heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they're even more suitable since you didn't mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven't needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)

On one hand, Mint's default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it's good to casually look around once you're comfortable.

Did you set your Mint to autologin to desktop? If so then your Keyring is then locked and you get prompts to unlock it when you want to use anything that needs it - websites, software like email etc. The keyring holds your passwords and credentials to pass to on as needed and keeps your system secure. If you set your desktop to not autologin - i.e. have a login screen - your keyring is unlocked automatically as you log on to the PC and you don't keep getting prompts to unlock the keyring. You can disable the keyring entirely or give it a blank password, but it's better to use the login screen to keep your device secure, and let the keyring do it's thing in the background even though "login automatically" is so easy to tick and use. The wallet is the same concept on KDE desktops.

Otherwise the only password prompts you should get are similar to windows - when you want to make system level changes.

I'd recommend OpenSuSE Leap with KDE. User friendly, stable, with a good GUI for making all system changes. Fedora KDE is also a good popular distro; I'm not sure how good it's GUI is but I'd be surprised if you need to use the terminal. People often recommend the terminal (because it IS quicker - often one step instead of "go here, click here, click here") but there is usually a GUI way of doing everything.

I've personally started using KDE plasma shell version of fedora, its as close to being windows (in terms of technical functionality) without actually being windows. On top of this you have the fedora community, and in a time where access of information has gone to shit, you can be rest assured that someone will get to your question or you'll find an answer to a question you may have on fedora.

After having stability issues with Ubuntu I switched to fedora. It just works. If you need to install something with the terminal just Google how to install program fedora and you'll find some simple commands to copy and paste. Just make sure you understand what you're inputting.

Step 1. Install Bazzite

Step 2. That's it. It just works

Based on those requirements, honestly, I'd recommend a Mac. Very user friendly, no terminal, very, very hard to fuck up, and only needs authentication when you're changing system settings.

Macs do things a little differently, so you'll have to learn the Apple way, but generally it's all very dead simple point and click.

ideally not requiring a terminal

No chance, sorry. Look at every Linux distro in existence and you'll find the terminal pinned in the Dock. Learning to use it is just part of The Linux Experience.

ideally doesn't require a password for every input

You can enable autologin, but in my experience this just means you have to enter your password in every time you open a new app. You can look into Howdy. Basically the Linux equivalent of Windows Hello. But this will require terminal to configure as well. And most likely still wont work because biometric hardware is rarely compatible with Linux.