Hi guys, My friend has given me her laptop to have a look at, its got a bunch of weird errors, its an old acer aspire cloud book 14. It had windows on it a while back and it just ran so badly, she paid someone at a computer store nearly £100 to make it work better..... They fired ubuntu mate 19.04 on it. So having a look there was a bunch of public key errors, apt update wouldn't work, said there were issues with the wifi. Long story short I'm not a Linux user never mind an expert, but i went through loads of forums trying loads of commands, and whilst i cleared a bunch of errors, its still throwing loads up, so we got all her files off of it. What is the most.... user-friendly version of linux, that shouldn't require much maintenance, she pretty much just uses chrome and some word doc stuff, maybe spotify, the machine is really low spec, celeron n3050 and 2gb ram (soldered) , 32gb (emmc) The only one i know really is ubuntu, but maybe there is something that's a better fit ?, looks pretty but isnt a resource hog, though you guys might have some experience with this situation. I tried talking her into a new laptop but she don't use it often enough to justify the cost of a new one
Ubuntu is the user friendly Linux, you could try a distro upgrade so if it repairs itself sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, if tha doesn't work because of public keys you can regeerate them, I have never done this but sounds easy enough Fix Missing GPG Key Apt Repository Errors (NO_PUBKEY) - Linux Uprising Blog but if you have all her files it might just be easier to do a new install with 21.0 etc.
Tried it buddy, its the LibreOffice install thats causing some of the issues, it has a unmet dependency and trying a purge , trying it with a force, dont seem to get around it. Bu thanks, yeah i was on that page already, i think just gonna flatten it and do a reinstall
For that kind of spec I don't think I would even go with the Mate UI. Probably something like XFCE, so XUbuntu. Which is very light weight, but looks like its straight from the 90's.
I'm using PeppermintOS on an old Samsung NC10. Still based on Ubuntu, but looks better than Xubuntu imho and far more usable than Windows on old hardware. Edit - also, Ventoy is brilliant if you want to actually try different distros. It's a multiboot utility that lets you just copy multiple iso files to usb, and choose which to run on boot. Its the only one I've found works reliably, including for Windows ISOs.
