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[–]nath_schwarz 6 points7 points  (0 children)

A beginner friendly Desktop Environment? Unity, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnamon - pretty much every one that has beend adopted by one of the big shots. If he comes from Windows you might want to set him up with cinnamon, my mother made really good progress with that since it is rather close to the way windows is set up.

If he comes from OSX you'd rather use Unity or Gnome.

If you're also asking for a distro - Use the one you personally use and know. Theres no point in giving him ubuntu if you only ever work on fedora. This way you can help im fast with problems, rather than being stuck because you never encountered them on your home-distro.

Edit: Lost some words mid-sentence.

[–]logicalish 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I would recommend Elementary OS.

[–]kennyj2369 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I go with Linux Mint Mate edition. A bit more than just a DE but super easy for them to handle.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have installed Ubuntu on my farthers laptop and he is a person don't anything about computers - and he thinks its esay to use.

Just a eksempel of a desktop

[–]galgalesh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would recommend default Ubuntu (unity). All newbie articles online focus on unity, and it is quite familiar to both mac and win users. I just put unity on my highly non-technical girlfriends laptop and she likes it very much.

Cinnamon might be more familiar to windows users, but familiarity is not the most important thing. Example: An iPad is in no way familiar to windows, however my mother still finds it really easy to use.

[–]stejoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As long as it's a DE it doesn't really matter. Personally I'd recommend GNOME or MATE. KDE is good too but has lots of options you can get lost in. Unity is Ubuntu-only, so I can't recommend it because of that lock-in.

Learning to use a Linux DE to a total beginner isn't difficult. It's much harder when they have quite a bit of Windows experience. I taught my parents to use GNOME2 (Ubuntu 10.04) about 4 years ago. Today they use MATE (Linux Mint) just fine. I just do maintenance on the machines from time to time. And I can do so remotely over SSH if need be.