Best Linux distro in 2025 for non-experts

I don't use that, because I don't need the simplest thing, I'm a more complicated person. But my wife does, and it's amazing. I set it up for her. I tried out a handful of desktop environments the other day to see which one is the easiest to use, cinnamon is the only one I tried that I'd recommend, which surprised me. KDE just gets in your way every chance it gets, others just deviate too much from the windows concept of a desktop for someone who isn't into Linux to start using, and the rest have quirky behaviors and bugs that just make life harder.

As far as the distro, you'll hear mint a lot, it's what Ubuntu used to be back when it was the easiest to use distro. I'll always recommend it to people that just need a desktop that works. Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop, your parents won't even notice except that they don't have forced updates and login to outlook and all the terrible cruft, they'll just have a computer that works for them again.

A few months ago my girlfriend started trying Linux and went with Pop!_OS on my advice. For most regular use it does indeed work fine, but she has needs for specific software that only exists for Windows. And that's where quite a few issues appeared. Both on the 22.04 and the new COSMIC version, the Lutris/Wine combination has... quirks. It's a pain to get her software working. It also just randomly _stops_ working. Whereas on a spare machine with just Ubuntu 24.04, all that stuff just works instantly.

Granted, not the most typical usecase, but even non-expert users can have hobbies that require obscure software. And more important than anything is that their software continues to work easily. I'm not sure I would recommend Ubuntu to a non-expert. It has its own quirks.

This comment ended up being less coherent and more ranty than I wanted, but there's a non-expert's Pop!_OS experience.