Every time I make this statement about Linux not being beginner friendly on Hacker News, there's always a reply about how so very pain free and easy it is.
If Linus Torvalds of all people is complaining about how much of a pain in the ass Debian can be to install, it's going to be a pain in the ass. Hell, Mint had countless issues I had to monkey patch and would break if I looked at it funny.
You cannot expect a beginner user to touch a command line or even think about desktop environments. We're computer nerds here but sometimes the expectation that booting from an ISO or making disk partitions is easy for the average person grossly overestimates the average person's desire to debug and fight with their computer.
Seriously, ask your Grandma to install Debian on her Windows computer by herself and see what happens.
I don't get the impression that you actually help people migrate to Linux.
When I do, I give them a flash drive and if necessary help them change the boot order, then they just answer what they understand and accept defaults on the rest. This typically works well and they are surprised that when install is done, it's really done, no messing about with license keys and downloading install binaries and whatnot.
Maybe not to install, but to chose what to install. Saying "install Debian instead of Ubuntu" is not a complete answer, because you have to select a window manager as well. If you go "pure" Debian, what should you then select? GNOME, KDE, cinnamon, xfce, Mate...?
It's an easier path to go with Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Less overwhelming choices when you just want to get started. Linux Mint is good for people used to Windows as it feels familiar. If you still want to go "pure" Debian you can use LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
Just go with the XFCE ISO and say you want to have non-free stuff, choose your locale and say yes to the partition plan, and you're done in like twenty minutes unless your storage is very slow.
Thanks. Well, in that case I would for sure select KDE Plasma over XFCE as it feels more modern from a design point of view and for someone coming from Windows or MacOS they would probably feel more at home.
