True story. Today my brother is totally pissed at windows (who wouldn’t be). He starting to seriously think about my past recommendations for Linux.
Would you feel comfortable recommending and installing Aurora or Bluefin on a 9 year old laptop?
Or would you let Aurora/Bluefin/Bazzite cook a little more, let them go with Mint or something then circle back in a year…
The options available from Universal Blue are there to address differing personal preferences.
Like I said - different offerings for different personal preferences.
And there is nothing stopping you from trying them all. They all install in a VM.
I do not care for Mint myself. But it does have quite a following as well.
Once you experience how easy it is to apply updates (even major version upgrades) with a simple reboot - it is really hard to look elsewhere. All of the Universal Blue OS offering have that feature.
Mint does not - at least not yet 
Hope that helps a little.
He is fairly technically competent. I’m sure he could load it up in VirtualBox on Windows if he wanted to. The only thing that does concern me is that he’s a DJ and uses a lot of audio software on the Windows side to make music. There may be some MIDI stuff he does, I don’t know how well that works in VirtualBox.
I have no idea how well this kind of setup (Audio software for DJs) would work on uBlue distributions. There is a Fedora Jam Lab spin that he could use. Not that I’m advocating more work for uBlue, but having Fedora Jam Lab as a spin could be interesting for audio-focused users.
What’s left to cook? Our images are for people who don’t want to set up friends on systems like that.
Thats a very good point! Maybe I’m just asking for re-assurance. That being said, I’ll definitely have to see how many of those apps on Fedora Jam Lab are flatpaks. I’m sure he’ll want to do his DJ stuff.
Do the homework.
Do NOT do the oposite, like installing Linux first, then search for app, then no support for user etc. This will not work at all.
Changing Windows with Linux is very last step, not the first step… and if done properly Linux distribution should not be such of importance. (I use Blufin, because like simplicity and most distro have set gnome as default, more users etc)
Good Advice. The one big downside I’ve seen is that many apps in the DJ/Audio space are not provided as flatpaks, but just RPMs. I really don’t want to do a bunch of layered applications if I can avoid it.
You should not layer, but install RPMs in distrobox container like:
I use signal in distrobox (I’d rather get updates directly than trust a community flatpak). Yes, you are right that RPMs in distrobox should work, but of course I don’t know if specialty audio stuff would.
My guess is an audio app rpm in distrobox should work, since it will very likely be interfacing with pipewire (“PipeWire is a modern multimedia framework designed for Linux systems that aims to unify and enhance the handling of both audio and video streams.”), which is installed and works for all fedora distros, including the ublue ecosystem. Here is a good overview of the audio stack in linux.
That is the real question. I’ve never really use an app and distro box with audio.
gosh, i was soooooo close to having my spouse convert from Windows to Linux (we’d both ended up picking bazzite because this would be a gaming system) but tragically couldn’t get them over the line because League of Legends specifically bans Linux 
i did end up on bluefin myself, mostly because i just know GNOME better than KDE
if you’re happy doing things the GNOME way and don’t need any GNOME extensions, then i’d recommend GNOME
if you need even a single GNOME extension, i would recommend KDE instead
I personally believe Bluefin is the most “cooked” of any Linux distro I’ve used.
As others in the thread said, the switch from Windows to Linux will be entirely dependent on application compatibility. Aside from that, I would have zero apprehension about recommending Bluefin to a “normal” Windows user. The way it handles system updates will be a breath of fresh air after dealing with Windows updates.
Its mostly different DE, so depends if you want Gnome vs KDE
Feature wise Bluefin and Aurora are pretty much on par
Aurora. KDE looks a lot like Windows (except Windows 8), so the migration is painless.
But a 9 year old laptop… Careful if it has an old nvidia card, might not be compatible.
Christmas is coming …
Tried it on my parents computer since mostly all they do is use a browser/pdfs/and save and share pictures. That’s perfect for Aurora! And more reliable, with me not having to constantly Teamviewer into their machine to keep it updated.
I have put Linux Mint on their computer for years because they love to download malware somehow on Windows and linux put a halt to all that.
I was surprised when they called and wanted Mint back because Aurora “took way too long to boot” and all the Flatpak apps were so slow to start and seemed sluggish to them.
I asked them how many times they were booting it for that to be an issue LOL and assured them that Flatpaks only start slow the first time and then run just as fast as Mint programs.
I’m guessing no matter how much Bluefin/Aurora is cooked - only Flatpaks can speed up Flatpaks. Not sure about the boot - because mine is not exactly that fast either, although it’s not important to me.