Yes, there are several distros that come with many things prepackaged. See Fedora, CachyOS, and Mint for examples.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I think Fedora is an excellent choice. It has up to date packages and its integration with KDE Plasma is pretty good.
I kind of 'force-moved' my wife to Fedora about 2 years ago, and she had never seen the terminal until last week. I saw she was about to open 'discover' to update everything, and I stopped her, opened the terminal and ran a dnf update, one 'put your password in there', and she was looking at it as if it was magic. Can you use it without the terminal entirely? Pretty sure you can. Now, should you?
Just lie and say they will never need to touch the terminal, then help them out when they need to and eventually they will see its not a big deal
I installed ubuntu for my father in 2010. He has no idea how PCs work, and he's been fine with it. And we are not even close.
Not a chance. Someone else can easily, but I wouldn't be able to resist.
Been using Fedora Workstation as my daily driver on my main gaming rig (and casual work machine) for over 7 years now; in the early days, yes CLI was necessary but I actually can't remember the last time I needed the CLI to configure anything on that machine. I use it to ssh into my homelab and that's it.
I also installed Fedora on a Pixlebook Go Chromebook (I am using to type this now) a year or so ago, I use this machine for casual web browsing, and playing games via GeForce Now (Excellent btw), and beyond the slightly complex effort to get Fedora stable on it at the start, I have not touched the terminal since then, and that includes a couple of upgrades from F41 to F43.
Honestly the main distro's are more than ready for the 'grandma' test, from about six months ago my eldest daughter (21) is rocking Fedora on her ageing laptop which I installed for her when she complained that it was 'getting slow' on Windows, she is an artist, has zero interest or knowledge of computers and has not come back since for any issue, she uses it daily.
Yes it is possible. I never need the terminal. If you are interested, you can usually find a GUI way if you look for one. Some people just don't look, then tell people there is no GUI for it. Not very helpful for newbies.
For those not into usability, different people work in different ways. Visual workers are not the same as text workers. So for some, CLI has poor usability and productivity. For lots of things I do, there isn't a CLI anyway.
I use Kubuntu these days. It could be better.
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn't always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It's like saying "I want to ride a bike but I don't want to learn how." After a certain point, I don't really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn't make it bad, or even necessarily difficult...but anything you don't know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it's not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it (edit: barring some very important accessibility concerns, which the GNOME and KDE teams have both shown to be open to learning from and improving on).
I disagree for two reasons.
First, meet the customers where they are. Lecturing people that they just need to get better doesn't sell software. It turns people away. If the goal here is converting Windows users - and I hope we all share that goal - we should be delivering software with which they're comfortable, irrespective of our personal preferences.
Second, the CLI isn't universally better. It's great for executing repeated commands which the user has already committed to memory. It sucks for discoverability. It sucks for seldomly executed tasks. It sucks for tasks which the user doesn't know are options. It sucks at teaching users how to do a thing. UI, on the other hand, is far better for all of that, and that is a lot of using an OS for the average person.
I almost asked this exact question today. I installed Ubuntu (Studio) for the first time and almost immediately needed to do some CLI shit because there's no GUI option to enable jumbo frames. I don't want to learn CLI. I just want to escape Windows.
I don’t want to learn CLI.
But...like, why? It is less effort than it was to type out the entirety of your post. I will never understand.
It's not, though. Tying a command doesn't take a lot of time, but learning what commands are useful in a specific situation does. Even "ls -la" is an achievement you need experience for. And it doesn't help that if you get stuck and ask (around here or in other enlightened circles) the answer you receive is usually some variant of "Have you read the 40-screen man page?"
That's why --help exists
Again, though...why is that bad? Did you know how everything in Windows worked the first time you used it? Of course not. Why is this different? There are going to be growing pains to learning anything new. What's wrong with reading the manual if you don't know how something works? Isn't that what they're for?
Just for the record, these are not the same questions you asked in your first post. But to answer them: nothing is different about this. But at some people don't want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it. And there's a difference between "learn how to use a new vacuum cleaner" (to give a particularly obvious example) and "learn how to use a completely new paradigm that is different from everything you have used before and doesn't have a clear starting point". (And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.)
Mind you, I'm not talking about myself, having used CLIs since the 80s, but just because I know how to do something doesn't mean it should be a fun activity for everyone.
But at some people don’t want to keep learning how to use stuff, they want to start using it.
That is impossible, then. I don't know what else to say to it. You can't use something without first learning how to use it. Life is learning new things, forever. We don't know how to do anything without learning first, and in the age of the web learning something has never been easier.
And before you say that the first steps are easy, let me rename all commands in your CLI and see how quickly you find out how to read a man page.
If I wanted to do something, then I'd figure it out. I do this all the time in my work. I don't know how every tool works, I don't know how every environment fits together. I still don't see how this is an argument for "I do not want to learn."
I still don’t see how this is an argument for “I do not want to learn.”
Because this is just one thing that you clearly know how to do and probably enjoy.
I don't know how many of the following things you are good at and enjoy, but the same argument applies to all of them: cooking, knitting, repairing a car, welding, growing crops. All of these are desirable and apply to things that most of us use regularly. But you just cannot expect everyone to learn them all in order to enjoy the products they could create or enhance by them. It is not problematic to say you just want to use something and not learn everything that is necessary to create or master it.
If you cannot see that this is true of a CLI, then I have run out of ways to try to explain it to you.
Yes.
All modern OS's require the terminal at some point (except iOS).
To your bonus question: portage
I've never used the terminal on Android for anything serious. I've used it, but only for really nerdy things most users will never need.
If you are just doing word processing, browsing the web, and playing video games then absolutely. Yes.
There have been gui tools available to install packages, configure networking/wifi, and manipulate files. For a long time now. Especially with the integration of Flatpak and snaps into gui-based package managers (like pop shop) it has become quite simple for any "regular", non-technical user to manage the basics and even the intermediates of any system (depending on the distro).
Where things will likely fall short is with troubleshooting. But to solve that we would need to build something like the windows troubleshooter. But with so applications owned by so many different groups it would be difficult/near impossible to write a troubleshooter to integrate them together.
Though I am also a bit of a hackerman so I probably also don't realize how much I use the terminal for normal things.
Tbh I can't remember the last time windows troubleshooter actually solved a single problem when trying to help people with their PCs. And there's like a fraction of a percent of the amount of discussion and documentation online for Windows versus Linux. A lot of problems for the former are literally just unsolvable.
Any you recommend for gaming? Ive had an issue getting steam games to launch, and I have heard cod will be a no-go, but that's not a big deal to me.
I play emulators mostly because I miss when buying stuff meant owning it.
Without knowing what game you were having issues with I can't provide much help. I would first recommend checking https://protondb.com/ to see the games status and if other people are running into issues. Most of the fixes are as simple as just switching what proton version you are using. (if someone recommends using a GloriousEggroll (GE) version of Proton then look into the app proton-up-qt, on your software center).
But I will admit many solutions on protondb are much more "involved".
As far as non-steam suggestions. I would start with heroic games launcher. I have had a very easy time with playing games through HGL, either EpicGames or GoG.
Outside of that, lutris is good. If you go to their website then there are one click installs for a bunch of games. This is mostly how I play things like battle.net games.
Then on the technical side of things is bottles. But that is the much more "build it yourself" option.
Even debian will let you download a Deb, double-click it in the file browser, and install it.
Impossible
"User-friendly" and "updated" sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I've had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde's softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.
Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.
You make it sound like Fedora is a lot less stable than Arch. I've had one update go wrong in 10 years lol
As a Linux Mint user who has only used Linux Mint, Yes, I've hardly used the Terminal, I've really only used it to download & run specific Software which is really just optional most of the time.
Rep to bonus question: Fedora, or any Ubuntu-based distro.
Definetely yes for years now. However, CLI is still preferred.
Generally you can use use the GUI with things like Nobara Linux.
But most software install instructions are all "copy and paste these commands".
Windows refugee here. I installed Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my main machine four months ago and I am still ironing out issues. Eg CUPS was asking me to login all the time and didn't accept my credentials. After some days researching I discovered I had to log in as root. Then, I discovered I didn't have root credentials for some reason. I had to create them and then add my local user to a group! Just to be able to use my home printer.
Or suddenly my clock was 62 minutes off. I discovered the NTP service was never set up properly and I had to install chrony.
I don't see how I could have avoided using the terminal. These are only a couple of examples. No deal-breakers and on this occasion I had the time and determination to resolve them. I could have easily given up.
Just a heads up, you should just need the group set up
That is crazy that you weren't added to it by default, though.
I was also surprised - you used to be able to modify a user's group membership through the System Settings GUI. That's a huge missing piece that you can't do that anymore
I installed Linux for my mother 15 years ago and she has never used the terminal once.
I update the Ubuntu from time to time and that’s it. Everything works and she can browse the internet, read email and listen to music.
Just as much as you can use Windows without the command line/powershell.
The vast majority of tasks do not require it but some will and some tasks will be easier via the terminal if you take the time to read 2-3 pages of documentation.
Don't be scared of the terminal
Can I? Yes. Will I? No.
Some things are just faster to do via terminal so I learned to use it over GUI for some scenarios.
SUSE has had graphical administration tools for literally decades. Somehow people always forget that.
Installing stuff works well from UI as well? I on/off did stuff with Ubuntu and every time I tried the App Store there was useless.
Yes, of course.
With Linux Mint you don't need the terminal 99% of the time. The rest distros are close to 95% of the time. I always suggest Mint to new users.
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Yes.
After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.
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