I’m looking for something my sister can use, but I don’t want her to face trouble when needing to change major releases, like debian or ubuntu do. So I’m thinking a rolling release distro could be of great help for this.
Being as vanilla as possible is a nice to have.
Ideally, she shouldn’t be dealing with config files though. So even though Arch or some derivatives like Manjaro would fit, they require users to investigate for the proper configurations and such, and as mentioned, she’s a non tech person. If there would be something Arch based, but having safe configs by default, and pretty much requiring to keep updating the SW often, that sounds fine, but I’m not aware of any. Having a graphical SW updater/upgrader should be required as well…
It shouldn’t matter much, but I believe KDE would be the best DE option for her, offering what she might need to feel like windows.
I was thinking of KDE Neon, but I’m not sure how ubuntu major releases are handled, neither how it is for a non tech person to go and add SW, not officially covered by KDE repos, neither if its “plasma discover”, or its upgrade on the air tool works for other things, rather than just KDE stuff upgrades… Maybe kubuntu might as well be an option, but major upgrades might be as user involved as the ubuntu ones…
If you’re wondering, I’m using Artix, and I 've used for quite some time before, Arch, Debian (unstable) and SourceMage. I’m honestly not familiar with something that might help my sister move from windows. She once told me someone helped her try ubuntu, but she didn’t feel comfortable with it… Any suggestions are welcome.
I’ll say that Solus is not pretty not, a rolling-release distro now. They took quite a while to package Kde plasma 5.20. Still a great distro, especially for beginners thought. I´ve switched to Arch for that, and the AUR really only.
Rolling release doesn’t mean bleeding edge. I could be rolling release while still retaining updates and doing testing. I don’t know much in terms of stability of other distros, but I found myself having very few issues with Arch while I have had a lot with Ubuntu (though it may be biased by the fact that I used Ubuntu while I was quite inexperienced).
I think it should be possible to build a good rolling release distro that requires much less manual maintenance and has a much easier install process than Arch though.
Then in that case, yes. I retire my point, and confirm that Solus is indeed a rolling-release distro.