In spite of my moderate-to-severe technophobia (to quote all the TV commercials), I have come a very long way from what we call “beginner’s” operating systems other than Microsoft Windows and iOS (Mac). Lately I have ventured even out of the Linux world into one of the BSDs. But I’m still every bit as paranoid of the terminal as I was the day I started this journey years ago. I want to point and click as much as possible, not type commands. And I want to run applications, not the operating system! I’m really not the computer hobbyist people suppose, even though I blog about this stuff regularly.

I still get asked what operating system I recommend for beginners, and until pretty recently I would recommend either Linux Lite, Linux Mint, or MX-Linux hands down without question. The only reason I hesitate to whole-heartedly recommend them now – and I’m going to catch some flak for this I’m sure – is because these great OSes have strayed so far off from the ideals and ways of doing things that made them great to begin with. Where once upon a time it mattered how they put together a great product, now the means have changed – which inevitably changes the ends. The old adage remains true: The end does not justify the means.

Non-free software and proprietary “blobs” (a tech term) get thrown into a product that is billed as “free and open-source.” Perfectly good and truly free and open-source software is replaced by the quick and easy solutions offered by Big Tech companies whose software becomes a dependency for just about everything else in the whole operating system to work. “This won’t work without systemd,” is what the developers say, but it isn’t true. Consolekit worked as well as elogind (a component of systemd), but it’s “old.” Old doesn’t mean obsolete, however. Old usually, in this context, means it did it’s one job and did it well. But Big Tech’s goal is dependency. One software to do multiple jobs instead of “do one job and do it well.” Big Tech owns Linux now. Billions of dollars flow into the Linux Foundation from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and other giants. They sit on the Linux Foundation’s Board of Directors and pay Linux Torvalds a million dollar salary. Put two and two together, y’all.

A handful of Linux distributions actively resist the DEPENDENCY game that Big Tech / Linux Foundation is playing upstream. And among that handful of Linux distributions, the best for beginners, by far, is PCLinuxOS. It still follows the old ways. The UNIX way. The pure and bold and time-honored way.

For some reason they call this”the Boomer Distro.” Maybe it’s because they follow the “old” ways. Boomers are supposedly old, but dangit, these guys work hard and make and maintain a superb “beginner-friendly” operating system that has all kinds of advantages.

It’s “rolling release:” Which means it doesn’t have to be re-installed every 2-5 years like Linux Lite, Linux Mint, the ‘buntus, Debian and it’s derivatives like MX-Linux.
It’s systemd-free: Not even a hint of that evil, intrusive, One-Ring-to-Rule-Them-All DEPENDENCY imposed by the Big Tech / Linux Alliance of Evil.
It’s well supported. The documentation for this OS is second to none, and the folks in the Forums are friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful. Just like most boomers.

While GhostBSD is my daily driver these days, I keep PCLinuxOS (Xfce edition, naturally) on a separate hard drive just for the cool tools that rival anything MX-Linux and the others have to offer. Cool tools that are simply not available in FreeBSD / GhostBSD yet. Also, since even GhostBSD doesn’t play nice on some hardware (compared to Linux, that is), your first non-Windows, non-Apple operating system should be PCLinuxOS! Find it here!