"SO proof" distro

Fedora Silverblue.

Or really any immutable OS; they would have to go way out of their way to even edit system files, much less break the system. I just recommend Silverblue because gnome is really hard for an inexperienced user to break.

Semi-serious suggestion: Guix or NixOS. They're not break-safe per se, but if they do break something, you can use the OS' previous generations to go back to an operational state. Just... don't let them use the commands that delete older generations.

(Semi-serious because they're both not exactly mainstream and not eactly conventional in their setup.)

Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, "turn it off and then on again" will almost always work to fix the OS.

I've installed popOS to a couple of relatives, haven't had anty issues for a year so far. Can definately recommend!

Fedora Atomic desktops, specifically Kinoite with KDE6 works well for me, and is basically unbreakable due to the way it works.

I vote the same, but I'd suggest a uBlue spin of the Fedora Atomic desktops. They have better defaults (all batteries included, as they say) and are easier to use overall IMHO. Bluefin and Bazzite are both great options, and both offer KDE and Gnome variants.

https://universal-blue.org/

Edit: TIL the KDE version of Bluefin is called Aurora.

BTW, uBlue is getting some big recognition lately. They have been on the Fedora Podcast (official) and Framework Laptops has official instructions on their website for installing Bluefin and Bazzite.
- Gotta be slightly careful with those spins though because there is near-zero documentation.
Fedora is a bit too eager to deliver new updates IMO, especially KDE. As much as I love KDE, their .0 releases have had serious bugs several times in a row now. It's always better to wait for .1 patch with Plasma. It may be hard for the user to break Kinoite, but it won't save them from bugs.

Fedora's mission have always been to push new stuff when it's "mostly ready" at the cost of inconveniencing of some users, so I wouldn't recommend it for non-tech-savvy people.

I know people say that it's 100% stable for them (as they do for Arch, Tumbleweed, Debian Sid, etc) but that's survirorship bias. As any bleeding edge distro, Fedora has its periods of stability that are broken by tumultuous transitions to the new and shiny tech (like it was with Pipewire, Wayland default, major DE upgrades, etc). During these times some people's setup will break and you don't know ahead of time if it will be yours.
- Pick one of the stable channels from Universal Blue. You get the Fedora atomic goodness, but "ready" rather than "mostly ready".
- eh, gnome is about the same.
  
  i always wait for at least the .1 or .2

Linux mint is a good, "click first" distro that won't break without root + will be easy for her to use. For something with a more modern desktop and more recent updates, Bazzite is really good at just working and (in my experience) has never broken

Bazzite might be what i go for the more i look at it. Thanks
- I like bazzite!
I have tried most known distros but not bazzite, yet. might be the next one on my distrohop journey since everyone recommends it. hope it works better than fedora kde, it does not get along with my hardware AT ALL

I've set up Linux mint for my sister in law and didn't hear from her the whole two years she was in college. But nowadays we have immutable distros. They're fantastic for a set it and forget it kinda thing. They're solid for those who don't want things to break.

Any of them. Just don't give the root password.

This is what I do with my mom and her boyfriend. I've had them on Linux for a few years now and neither have managed to break anything.
Set up Tailscale and an SSH key for remote tech support

Aurora by Universal Blue. She will be unable to break it, and it's so freaking easy to use and install.

While I enjoy using Aurora, there were a bunch of issues popping up over the last few months (e.g. display freezes). I guess that's the danger of a rolling release cycle, but I'm not sure it's 100% as foolproof as it needs to be right now.
- Aurora is not a rolling release. It's part of Universal Blue, based on Fedora Silverblue.

I’m gonna be the boring guy.

RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)

Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.

Benefits:

Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
Actually works
Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.

Drawbacks:

Boring (for you)
Not ideal for gaming

If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.

Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.

In the era of Flatpak, I kind of agree with you.

The primary drawback is the complete lack of packages. A home user is going to want something not included and then things fall apart. Flatpaks and Distrobox have made that a lot better.

If you could get away with a RHEL core and Flatpak for apps, you would have a pretty solid setup for a “normal” person.
- I both agree with you, and kinda disagree.
  
  If you venture into installing Flatpaks on such a system, just keep in mind that:
  
  Auto updates must be on
  
  The Maintainer of the Flatpak in question must be expected to provide security updates for the next five years or so. Personally, I’d only use it for packages provided directly by project maintainers (i.e. Dropbox from Dropbox Inc. as packaged by Dropbox Inc.).
  
  Keep in mind, like 95% of normal people (we are not normal) don’t know what a package manager is and only use
  
  ”The internet”
  
  Webmail
  
  Google Docs
  
  Spotify
  
  For that, we need the default desktop install and the Spotify app (probably a Flatpak). That’s about it. It’s a glorified web browser with batteries. Treat it that way and keep it that way, unless your SO has any specific needs and requirements.
  
  The limited and dated package set is kind of a feature. Only packages that should work until the laptop breaks, and only packages that won’t change randomly when you update (mostly).

Mint.

I have my mum (67) and my partner using it.

Libre office and Firefox cover 99.9% of all the things mum actually does.

My partner uses blender, krita and audacity also.

Auto updates... Almost no tech support.

Linux mint makes sense. Auto updates and its hastle free for non techy person like me.

Even if I'm doing something crazy , chatgpt to the rescue.

Since less techy people tend to use more the mouse/touchpad anyways, I would pick a hard-to-mess-with desktop environment like Cinnamon or Gnome. With KDE, XFCE and such you can screw panels really easily if you don't know what you're doing.
Slap Debian under it and there you go

Use Bluefin or some other immutable/atomic distro.

The upside is that it's rock solid and will likely never fail in a way that cant be easily rolled back. The downside being that it's slightly more complex to administer than a traditional distro model (which probably isn't a big problem if you are going to be administering your SO's PC for the most part.)

Bluefin is basically a more general desktop, less gaming-focused version of Bazzite. Bluefin uses Gnome, but there's also a KDE Plasma version called Aurora.

An immutable distro would be a good choice. They are distros designed to be more resilient against failure. For a gamer, bazzite is a solid choice; otherwise, silverblue.

I guess it depends what she does on her pc.

But ignoring that, Mint without sudo. Throw in flatpaks and appimages.

Immutable distros are probably fine too but in my experience they tend to be a bit fussy if you need to change something in the system config.

Ubuntu, always a solid choice for beginners but Gnome shell is a bigger change from windows conpared to Cinamon.

P.S. I have Mint on our TV PC and my SO handdles it without issues.

Any immutable distro would do I guess

Aurora or Bluefin would be great, general purpose distros. They're based on Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue, respectively, so you get that atomic unbreakability with the addition of some handy software and easy, optional scripts via ujust.

I have Bazzite on a laptop specifically for this reason, so if I ever kick the bucket early, they will have a reliable and portable computer.

Bazzite does seem like a good option, thanks.
Aurora gets a vote from me. I set it up for my technically repulsive father, and he gets on just fine with it.

Does she want this?

If so then just set her up exactly what you have so you can easily help when there’s a problem.

If not then get her the computer she actually wants.

It's a no money and cant run windows 11 situation.
- Consider 0patch before you give up on windows. They do good work and it’s real affordable.
  
  No matter what you do, in this circumstance it’s worth keeping that windows partition around.
  
  I do think whatever you use is the right choice though.
  
  E: I looked up the 0patch pricing and you get a year of patches for a bunch of eol versions of windows like 7 and 10 for $25 a year. It’s a good deal I think for people who don’t want to or can’t upgrade to 11, and they beat Microsoft to a bunch of zero day exploits.
  
  I know you said it’s a no money kind of situation but I really think when ten is still a possibility theres two bucks and some change a month in the budget.

Any of the ostree variants of Fedora, be they Fedora Official or downstream ones like the Universal Blue family

I switched from ubuntu to debian when 12 was released and it's been fine. Only thing i was worried about was running WoW via lutris but had no issues.

So when my SO windows pc died we bought some newish parts and i installed debian on it as well. Also installed chrome since that's her browser of choice. She's still getting used to gnome, but all she needs is browser, WoW, and libreoffice, which is close enough that it hasnt been an issue. She doesn't even know how to update the system.

I've got my wife and 5 year old on slackware. They wouldn't know how to screw it up if they wanted to!

BLUEFIN.

If you're not going to give her sudo access then I'd say it'll be really hard maybe even impossible to screw up. Also maybe setup a cron job that'll do auto updates and if needed add in a check to make sure it isn't uninstalling anything. Also how about immutable distro.

Debian is good at being basic, generic, stable AND has an automatic security-update-in-the-background feature

The whole amount of instruction to give to Dear SO is just to reboot the machine if it ever seems to misbehave

"Hello IT have you tried turning it on and off again?"

I recently set up Fedora Kinoite on my dad's laptop for him and he seems very happy with it. Kinoite is the atomic/immutable version with KDE Plasma by default. Once I'd set up a couple of things everything else he needs can be installed with flatpak (just make sure to set Flathub as the default and disable the Fedora flatpaks repo that ships broken packages all the time)

Use btrfs snapshots. Bring the PC to a state that you like, make a snapshot. Then on shutdown set the profile to reload to the specific snapshot.

Any issues? Just restart. Might take a minute, but it ensures the exact same environment every time.

I would like to avoid BTRFS at all costs if possible. But snapshots are definitely part of my plan.
- Why? I have used btrfs for years and haven't had any issues with it, it functionally works about the same as ext4.
- So be it. I've been using btrfs for a long time now without any real issues. No idea why everyone's dick gets so hard whenever you mention it.
Doesn't this mean that the system is never up to date? If so, please don't.
- I mean, yes. You can't exactly snapshot a system and return it to operational order "under any circumstances" without compromise....
Grub-btrfs is what broke my setup. Btrfs is what broke my backup. This was last week. Come again with btrfs if it gets stable.

I thought this was a request for Stack Overflow proof.

Then figured that was 'proof from pasting random crap from SO".

Then figured it's the same thing.

Any distro will be suitable, create yourself as the first user when installing (which will probably be added to the wheel/sudoers group or whatever) then create a new 'standard' user.

Most distribution defaults should be adequate.

For added safety, choose one that is immutable like, for example, Fedora atomic.

I prefer Manjaro, super easy.

Zorin OS is trending

Zorin is a good shout, but it's definitely not "trending", it's been a staple recommendation for over 5 years now.

OpenSUSE MicroOS

Nixos with whatever defaults you don’t want her touching, then she can use nix profiles to install extra software if she wants

Has "non techy" evaded you ?
- You can install imperatively using nice profiles. So you the OP can set up the base distro in a way their SO can’t break. Then any extra software can be installed imperatively using nix profiles. Any installed software will work as normals. Checking the normal places for configurations if their SO even needs to go that far