Glad to see this doesn’t get downvoted to oblivion on Lemmy at least. On Mastodon I have encountered quite some hostility on anything that could be seen as “blueanon”.
Took some time for the topic to federate, there were 10s of thousands of ppl on the subreddit about this immediately after election day having a look on the numbers. But cool that it did.
I think the sub was “somethingiswrong2024” or so, if it still exists, haven’t been on reddit lately.
If the friend likes windows server specifically, they’re in for a ride…
EndeavourOS is pretty good at making using Arch a bit easier in an opinionated way.
Fedora’s usually do a good job making the keyboard thing consistent. If you’re gaming and want something that you don’t need to adjust all the time check out Bazzite.
In any case give KDE Plasma desktop a shot especially if you’re used to how Windows works. I mean a more vanilla version that what Garuda probably came with.
The people saying tiling managers are the shit are the ones who have been Linuxing for quite some time. I think newcomers should just always go for a major, mature, opinionated desktop first. KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Mate or Xfce if you really like some old school aesthetic or have no RAM to speak of (<4GB). Distro choice comes after, I don’t recommend base Ubuntu for most people because of the risk of enshittification from Canonical that I see on the horizon.
I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.
Oh yeah, a lot of pure nonsense in there as well, gotta filter out the relevant bits.
And I do realise it’s pretty hard to say especially from outside the USA whatever was going on as I don’t ultimately know my way around the election system. So my point is basically that I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turned out to be shady. Europe has now had its first cold shower moments with Trump II so what I hope is people stop parroting stuff like “It’s a developed country, of course their elections are free&fair”.