I'd suggest 0 change at first : boot on a live USB then connect with her Web accounts (e.g. Firefox Profile) then get an easy win. Sure not 100% will work but she'll be 80% there in minutes. If she hates it, logout, reboot, remove key and that's it.

Why do you want to start a distro war?

Is this with the intent of trolling our community?

"Let many flowers blossom".

The one she likes... How about listening to her needs, and then show here some examples, and let her choose?

I'd present her with Mint and Ubuntu - and then what you know is her "style"...

I think Linux Mint would be a good first distro.

I recently learned about a project called Operese. It is a Windows to Linux migration tool that also sets up Kubuntu. Kubuntu is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment instead of the GNOME desktop environment. I don't know how well that tool works since I never tried it but it looks promising.

There is also a new project called Winboat that is meant to make it easier to install and use Windows software such as Adobe Photoshop

If older computer that works fine, I'd get a new 780m (Amd) mini pc. They support 3+ monitors, have 2 network ports allowing to "daisy chain" the old computer. No transfering of anything, or worrying about getting old stuff still working.

Deskflow is a mouse/keyboard sharing app. If you keep old computer in sleep mode you don't need extra keyboard/mouse, but power outages, mean that if you don't have a floor standing old pc you can stack old keyboard/mouse on top of, then you will need to occasionally plug in keyboard and mouse into old computer to get deskflow restarted (if you don't put it as autostart).

It's far more convenient than dual booting. Can use resources from both computers in network, and seemless mouse/keyboard focus. Switching 1 monitor for occasional use is better than dual booting, because rebooting on older computers especially is slow.

Deskflow needs a modern kernal linux distribution. Ubuntu 24.04 is recent enough. Linux mint has not upgraded kernel yet. AFAIU, the only difference between mint (recommended here) and Ubuntu is a slightly prettier version of kde.

Show her some pictures or videos of DEs and see what she likes. If she's someone who likes to make it look the way she wants, she might get a bit more out of KDE than Cinnamon for example.

There are two “just works” distros I recommend to new users: Bazzite or Fedora.

Start with Bazzite. It is familiar and has lots of guardrails so it’s nearly impossible to break.

If you decide you want more control over your system later, switch to Fedora KDE.

If you decide you want even more control and flexibility, consider CachyOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

You will see Mint recommended a lot, but I don’t like it. The default desktop — Cinnamon — is very Windows 95, and I much prefer KDE Plasma, which doesn’t work well on Mint. Mint also has driver issues with newer hardware. But if you like retro and your hardware is older, give it a try.

Avoid Pop_OS right now. It’ll probably be amazing in a year, but the new Cosmic desktop (currently a beta) has a lot of annoying bugs with common linux GUI packages.

As a general rule of thumb, I usually recommend Linux Mint to beginners. The installation and update processes are easy and intuitive, and there is a ton of software available, as well as good support if you know how to do web searches properly. The main trick is to try and remember that a paradigm shift needs to happen here. Linux is not Windows. It doesn't work like Windows, and it has different aims and priorities. She will also need to be prepared to learn a bit and be slightly more hands-on with her computing. The learning curve with Mint is comparatively gentle, but it does exist.

This is all very broad and general, but I hope it helps. Good luck to the both of you. I hope you are satisfied with whatever you decide on.

Bazzite, i tried arch and then realized the whole wiki was like a uni level symposium and was burning through steps, kept doing instead of understanding, etc...

It's probably amazing, but since my only interaction with linux back then was being forced to use it at uni and windows, I really wanted a good experience of what linux could be. I needed it to work out of the box and be unbreakable, so I went with bazzite.

It's great, and I am digging the immutable aspect even if it broke my brain for any dev work, but once you learn how to use an immutable system (still figuring it out tbh) it's solid, easy, and works great.

Really wished there was more resources on immutable systems for newcomers though XD