What you meant is not simple, but rather familiar. While I agree, my mother used Windows for many years, but she forgot that experience partially, due to using iPad for like 15 years. So, Gnome is simpler for her, as it’s similar to her most recent experience.
My perception of Plasma is that’s too complex, even for me. While Gnome’s logic is very different, it’s not difficult to grasp, to be effective with it.
Anyway, if we’d go with the theme. Are there some you’d like to recommend? I’m still balancing between going with Gnome and teaching them it, and just going with the Plasma and making it similar to what they had.
The less options, the better for a new person to jump in. Modern Gnome is a DE I can recommend everyone. ‘It’s like Mac but simpler,’ I advertise it. I like it even as a pro user, though. But even if we, the pro users, couldn’t work with it, that’s okay. Many pro users hate modern Gnome, and use other environments. But having one with limited options and an opinionated design hurts nobody, and helps a lot. I can install it for an elderly parent or a friend, and they can use it without much assistance, as it’s not very far from their tablet or smartphone.
My bet is that there’s some weirdly complex things that become too niche edge cases that are difficult to transfer.
My opinion is when your logic becomes too complicated, maybe you want to have some sort of custom software. But, on the other hand, I understand that if it works already, there’s no need to break it either.
I’m same as you (7 years though), but I have Fedora as a family computer. I mostly like it. I used Fedora for a year almost exclusively a couple of years back, and I quite enjoy the experience as a macOS refugee. Tried Silverblue (immutable distro), it looks even better for an average folk, but I haven’t used it for a long time to comment on that.
Recently, a Fedora installation broke on me (bad kernel upgrade), and was so for a month, spanning 4 kernel upgrades. I had to manually boot into a working kernel (F8 during boot in grub), and remove the new kernel. I avoided updates till there was a newer kernel version, tried again, to no success. It took them a month to fix the regression, now it’s good back. The kernel versions were since 6.17.10 till 6.18.4, and time frame was since December 14th till January 12th this year. It was relatively trivial to troubleshot (I used ChatGPT for assistance, but I was knowledgeable of what I was doing).
I have no idea what would a regular new user do. I have no idea how a Silverblue version would handle this situation, I have a regular Fedora Workstation installed.
However, apart from that, I have been running Fedora without any issues for years. One computer runs about 5 years now. The other served me for a couple of years, now it’s Arch Linux server, but it had no issues at all.
I guess I’d avoid Ubuntu. I might have tried Bazzite (if for gaming) or Pop_OS! (for their Cosmic Desktop thing). I have no other distros in mind. I don’t like Debian, especially for a desktop, it’s too old, and running testing… well, I’d rather run Arch then.
Fedora has RPM Fusion, which is kind of AUR, so distros based on it should theoretically have it too. But I don’t have any first-hand experience with that.