Ubuntu or mint is a good beginners choice.
Once you get annoyed with snap packages or something else you can change it.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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I too have very limited coding ability and started with mint about a year ago myself. I think it's a good OS. The different nomenclature confused me in the beginning, but ChatGPT is pretty reliable troubleshooting issues and I met plenty very helpful people on here that offered to teach me. You will be fine. Just a tip: back up your important data or at least don't keep it on the same drive as your OS, because I broke mine in many, many curious ways when starting out, and had to reinstall a few times xD
I run immutable Fedora distros (Bluefin, Bazzite) and they are the most stable distros I've ever used. Immutable distros restrict writing to sensitive parts of the OS so you're less likely to break things. You'll mostly install Flatpaks which looks pretty similar to using the Windows app store.
I've seen some people say that immutable distros aren't good for beginners. I'm really not sure why. My best guess is because they're not the norm and you might run into support issues if things do go wrong.
If all of that sounds too scary then Linux Mint is a good choice. Never used PopOS myself but I hear that's a good starter OS too.
Yes. I main Mint in my laptop, and it's been my go-to for general purpose use (gaming included) for the past 10-15 years. On servers I prefer other distros, but Mint has consistently been the one that works best out of the box in a laptop desktop environment.
Parroting the no need to code.
Follow the comments about trying a distro/type of Linux.
Something you may not know is what is called a live disc. You can run a type of Operating system without installing it. This lets you try it out without actually installing anything. However know that if you install a program to try out it will it safe when you reboot or shut down.
Please use this. NetBoot.xyz
It essentially lets you burn a cd that you boot from. This then lets you try out countless types of Linux before you install them. This way you don’t need to burn 20 discs or flash a new usb drive each time you want to try a different Linux.
Try installing mint! Make sure you've cleared everything you want from the hard-drive before you start (and decide now if you're going to dual-boot. If so, clear up space so you can do the partitioning you want before you start the process.)
How did you use Windows without understanding coding? lol
Pop os