Will be brief, her laptop is EOL with windows 10 being discontinued. I have an old laptop laying around that I could repurpose for her. If I reimage with Windows 11 she would be familiar and her son who lives nearby could give her assistance from time to time but I have to install by creating a custom image via Rufus as the hardware of my laptop is not supposed to run Win11. If one day Micro$oft decides to drop unsupported devices she will be back with an unusable computer.

I could install Mint and she will likely be ok but I will be in charge of IT support if something goes sideways. She only needs OnlyOffice and an app to read and edit pdfs.

The reason I am posting here is to ask: how often did you had to help a family member with Mint? On my computers I never had issues as it pretty much is set and forget but I am far from the standard user. Can you share something that happened with you?

If I manage to get her on Mint she will pretty much be able to use that laptop up until the moment the machine will stop working or if she decides to get a new one. With windows she will be able to use it up until the vendor will decide otherwise.

And, last one, assuming I set Mint for her and considering I want to have near 0 chances to be called for issues, shall I go for LMDE or the standard edition?

Going to work now but will respond once I get back home

As per title, I am mind-blown by the speed and stability of NixOS on this "relic" in IT terms... On this machine i tested:

And the best thing is that I can bring this config with me on any computer! Oh boy, I think i have fallen in love with NixOS

If we take stability as a parameter, is it safe to match them like this?

• Fedora --> Ubuntu
• CentOS Stream --> Ubuntu LTS
• RHEL --> Debian

I know that CentOS stream is more kind of a rolling release but... feels like an LTS distro in practice... or it is just me?

Edit: adding some context. I am planning to setup a dev machine that I will connect to remotely and would like to babysit very little while having stable and fresh packages. In the Ubuntu world we would go to an LTS release but on the RPM/Dnf world is there any other distro apart from CentOS Stream? And also is CentOS Stream comparable to an LTS release at all considering that they do not have release number?

I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.

I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.

A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.

Again, mind blown by the performance.

I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.

This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)

The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…

Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…

I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.

Rant over.

Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!

I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?

Edit: Thank you all for sharing your experiences! The ones I found more interesting are those that can easily translate in reducing or tracking consumption. The rest I hear but makes more sense when I look at it from an hobbyist perspective.

As per title, have you experienced any distro on this device? Currently torn between mint/Debian or just vanilla Debian

Does any of you know firsthand how the ad industry works? I hate them with all my heart and I already go out of my way to block them but maybe you have been on the other side of the fence and can share some internal insight on what to focus on to really disrupt the data collection. I.e. even if I use uBlock can the ad network still build a profile? Is the benefit only cosmetic on my end? I also run a local AdGuard instance on my network

Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all my friends for years about moving to Fedora (back then it was because I hated Unity) but now… I mean, I know that we are suppose to hate it for Snaps and what not but… Christ, it does run well! In fairness all my VMs are running DietPi (a slimmed version of Ubuntu) and coming back to the APT world feels like coming back home.

On the other end forcing myself to be on Fedora allows me to stay on the DNF world that is compatible with Amazon Linux etc (which I use for work), it has updated packages, it is nice and clean…. Argh, don’t know how to decide!

Thoughts?

I am not in the mood for Debian. I like the Mint approach but I am not a fan of slow rolling releases and also would like to keep myself as close as upstream as possible, the Debian version is the only one that seems reliable enough but, again, it is Debian, the packages are “old”. Pop Os and similar are two hops away from upstream and so I’d rather not.

Is Snap really that bad?

Edit: thank you all for sharing your experience !