Couldn’t find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it’s ok to ask here.
A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend’s kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can’t play Factorio.
For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can’t easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don’t spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn’t seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.
- Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
- Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
- Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn’t need to be “kid proof”, I don’t think he touches any stuff he doesn’t know what it does.
Mint was my first thought as well. Haven’t used it myself but in the past I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be very user friendly and stable, though I’m not really up to date on Linux distros so I wanted to check if this was still was true (which is seems to be) and if there were any new options.