Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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What you want is an OEM install. Ubuntu and mint have them. Note sure what others do.
Fedora too, if the users are tech illiterate and they come from Windows it might be worth going for the Kinoite spin. They wouldn't be able to wreck it and the UI would feel more familiar to them.
besides these--which i occasionally use the oem option with.. i just put endless on one here, it also sets up the initial user during the first boot after install.
the oem install option that is available with ubuntu and some ubuntu-based ones lets you do some initial extra package installs and stuff, though. you run a command linked on the oeminstall desktop when you're finished with your 'preinstall'.
What is typically done, e.g. buying a PinePhone with PostMarketOS or refurbished setup deGoogled Murena phone, is having a default user with a well known password, e.g. 123456. AFAIR when you setup Rasbian you do have an interface to have a default user with a password.
I personally made an ISO of a configured distribution, see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Cookbook/Electronics#SocialWebXRRPi0 and that worked quite well for my use case.
It's called "OEM install".
Ubuntu based distros should have it.
Some Fedora variants do that too. Not sure which ones.
PopOS should be able to do this since System76 makes it partly to be preinstalled on computers they sell at retail. According to some anonymous poster on reddit, it will prompt for a new user creation on the next boot after deleting the user account.
You can try NixOS, there you can declaratively create users even set their passwords by providing the hash of their pass in the config file. It can also set the config of all your apps and have different sets of apps installed and configured depending on certain conditions.
Sorry, Nixos is great, but you qlearly didn't read the requirements.
Yes, sorry, my bad. Plus that's not really beginner friendly distro
I'd argue that it's not even a veteran-friendly distro, given the steep learning curve. 😅
still love it, tho. ❄️❤️