But as OP said, they already failed several times. That’s like telling someone who nearly drowned in the shallow end of a pool to go jump into the ocean.

See here:

So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial?

For me it feels like they do want to learn, but aren’t comfortable yet as a day to day user. They want to use Linux, but struggle with commands and how to use it. Having a stable and easy to use system you can use each day without trouble would probably be a better start than telling them to fiddle with Arch. Give them an easy distro and when they want to learn more they can use the crappy old laptop and try to install Arch on there (while leaving their daily driver alone).

I think I learned the most when using Ubuntu for school, 90% of it was easy and straight forward. 10% of it was hell, like back in the day getting HDMI or audio to work. But because the 90% were there I just dug in and spent a dozen hours to troubleshoot the rest.

I tried that after already having about 2 years experience with Ubuntu desktop and an Ubuntu server (but still mostly a Windows user). I’m also a software developer.

And I failed to install Arch on a laptop the last time I tried it out. Ubuntu ran flawlessly, trying to go step by step through the Arch installation I hit a random error (at a step that was very straight forward and easy in the documentation) and got stuck. Messed around with it and at some point gave up.

I mean that’s years ago, it probably works a lot better nowadays and especially on more modern hardware, but even so for someone new to Linux I’d never tell them to go with a do-it-yourself install. Slap Ubuntu on that bad boy, let them install a few packages, do a handful of terminal commands and they’ll get much farther. Instead of giving up three hours in because a random command (that they still don’t understand) is broken.

They might dip their toes in at first. But then you’ll have 9 out of 10 big communities/users on Threads (or probably 99 out of 100 if we’re realistic). And at that point if Meta defederates nobody of those users will care. Threads will become Twitter 2.0 and be its own thing, while Mastodon will be crushed with a tiny user base in comparison (which will get even smaller because most content is on Meta servers, so users switch over to Threads).

Marketing and content boost for the start maybe? Mastodon has come up a lot recently (hell, even in local radio), so Meta can use this to promote their own product. And already have content right there for users joining Threads, it’s not a blank slate.

After the initial boost and when sucking up millions of users they can just defederate and have their Facebook (or rather Twitter) 2.0.

Even worse when you browse /r/all, find an interesting post about some topic, join the discussion, type out a long reply, hit send…

And 3 seconds later you get an automod message that your comment was removed. Because you aren’t a subscriber to that (default!!!) sub, or you aren’t verified, or you used a word they don’t like.

And even worse: You join a discussion, got some good points back and forth, everything is great. You try to reply to the latest comment in that chain to keep the conversation up and suddenly your comments get blocked. Because it was a /r/blackpeopletwitter post (you didn’t even notice as you found it on /r/all) and at some point they only locked it down for verified black users, kicking you out of the discussion.

I mean sure, have your own space on Reddit (even if it’s basically racism), that’s fine. But then subs like these shouldn’t be default subs on /r/all when they constantly lock down threads.

Gated communities on Reddit suck.

A thread hits /r/all, you type out a long comment in reply to someone, hit send… then get an automod message that your comment was denied. Because you aren’t part of that subreddit, or you aren’t verified in that subreddit.

Probably the worst example was /r/blackpeopletwitter. They have open threads where you can talk with people. Then at some point they lock down their threads (make it verified black users only) and your next comment in a chain of replies simply gets nuked. Even though you had a civil discussion and just wanted to continue it.

Often those threads aren’t even about race, just general things happening. Reddit has shitty support to lock things down where the UI doesn’t get greyed out. So you already type a long reply, hit send and only then you get kicked out. I had to block several of those subreddits because I kept running into this issue when browsing /r/all.