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!

  • hiroyt@lemmy.sdf.org
    281·
    9 hours ago

    Regarding Specs, I’d choose a lite DE.

    • Xubuntu
    • Linux Mint with Mate or Xfce

    You can even use an LTS version for longer lasting editions.

      • DaveA
        5·
        8 hours ago

        Linux in general has good language support.

        I’ve yet to find a distro with NZ English 😆. I’d love to just start a new dictionary and add words to it for all the spell checks, but I’ve never worked out how to do this. I’m not sure there’s even system level spell check.

          • DaveA
            3·
            5 hours ago

            Haha I get that I can’t really expect better than “English”, or maybe “US English” and “UK English”, but having a system wide dictionary I can add words to by right clicking and choosing “add to dictionary” would be nice.

            As I understand it, each program keeps their own.

            • ogeist@lemmy.world
              2·
              4 hours ago

              I’m curious now, what’s a NZ English word that’s unique to NZ?

              And yes, there is no system wide spell check, but I think windows/macos also don’t have this.

              The only system I know with system wide spell check are smartphones.