I just read an alarming number of comments on a distro-inquisitive post about how evil Canonical has been. I had no idea that Canonical wants to put ads on the desktop; I saw literally no sign of even the name anywhere at all, but reading this and seeing people say that Ubuntu shouldn’t even be an option any more has got me concerned about Canonical going Microsoft-like in telemetry.
Unfortunately, I just installed Mint Cinnamon in the weeks prior on the computers of some very non-tech-savvy seniors before reading these. If all/any of this is true, how do I move people who are already settling their personal info into their current build of Linux Mint? Someone said that LMDE is behind in various ways, including NVIDIA graphics drivers, so that’s not preferred, either. I’m interested in atomic/immutable Fedora Kinoite for myself, at least.
Mint is based on Ubuntu but not made by Canonical. Dint worry about it.
Don’t listen to fearmongers and keep on doing what you doing.
I think you chose well with Mint. It is based on Ubuntu, but has a track record of stripping out Canonical’s nonsense, and if said nonsense should ever become impractical to remove, Mint already has a contingency plan in the form of their Debian Edition.
Someone said that LMDE is behind in various ways,
Someone on social media is always echoing the meme about Debian being unusable due to old packages, but roughly 96% of the time, that person turns out to be poorly informed and driven by an unhealthy addiction to quickly rising version numbers. Try not to give their opinion much weight, despite how loud and repetitive they are.
including NVIDIA graphics drivers
Why would “non-tech-savvy seniors” care what version of the Nvidia driver is installed?
Edit: To answer the question in your headline, putting the /home directory on a separate partition tends to make switching distros easy.
Why would “non-tech-savvy seniors” care what version of the Nvidia driver is installed?
Maybe he still loves playing games? 🤷 And sometimes new GPUs and drivers can be a bit tricky and buggy !
Debian being unusable due to old packages
Yeah… Debian is probably the most stable distro I’ve ever used ! I even forget it’s installed on my server sometimes and that APT is the package manager xD
No need move anywhere for now, Linux mint team will find out if telemetry or something else will enter to their distro,Linux mint doesn’t have any telemetry so calm down
Oh, okay; I didn’t know how interrelated the Mint devs are with anyone at Canonical. It sounds like they’re totally independent, which is great! It was just a bit of a shock to see people here say “Stop using Ubuntu” entirely, though, since it’s such a household name in the world of Linux that it sort of upended my entire perspective for a bit.
Don’t take what Linux users say as gospel. There’s a wide variety of opinions that - yes - generally have some basis in truth, but usually it comes down to personal preference. Just because a vocal minority hates on systemd doesn’t mean you now have to switch to Devuan. FOSS is full of opinionated and passionate people, but you should always use what works for you. Don’t let others dictate how you use your computer and what code you run. Free as in freedom.
Now, having said all that, Canonical is suspect, don’t use Ubuntu. Mint is fine.
Right, what I mean is that:
Canonical is suspect, don’t use Ubuntu. Mint is fine.
I didn’t realize this distinction was so massive given how Mint is built on Ubuntu, right?
A software fork doesn’t automatically say that things are being added on top. It’s less so an add-on and more so a mod, and Ubuntu being OSS means the Mint devs could just dig in and pull out whatever nasty things people don’t like. Snaps are a good example:
sudo apt install firefoxon Ubuntu started installing the Firefox Snap somewhere before 2022 (I don’t recall exactly), but Linux Mint has never had Snap support by default, and has been installing the Debian package of Firefox (Like Ubuntu used to) for a long time, and will probably continue to do so
The Mint team removes the bs Canonical puts in Ubuntu - that’s why they’re the best beginner distro - it’ll be fine.
Sweet, thanks!
I’m not 100% sure on how things work, but if Ubuntu does get ads on its desktop at one point, I’m almost certain that it won’t propagate to Mint.
regardless if you switch distros or not it’s good practice to backup stuff to either a personal server or even a private git repo.
I distro hop every so often, heck just did it lastnight, and what makes it easy for me is using borg which backs up daily to my server. It backups personal files, ssh stuff, and some dotfiles. I also do a push to my private forgejo before hopping and that will be configs and what have you so when I’m on a new distro it’s just a matter of cloning that private repo and then accessing a recent borg backup and i’m good to go. For Arch based distros I use something called DCLI which backs up a list of packages I have installed so I can pull that down and then merge it to my system and it automatically installs the packages I want. All of this allows me from once spending a couple hours setting up a system to now a few minutes. Doing all this makes distro hoping a non factor for me.
Thanks for the reminder to dig into Timeshift more!
I’ve been using Debian for a decade or so and it’s been fine for me. Fedora had its own drama a while back because of Red Hat. I don’t know its situation now. I think the cool kids these days use Guix. IDK what the attraction of Mint is supposed to be.
I’ve never even heard of Guix. Mint is swift to get non-tech-savvy people up and running immediately, with a nice calendar desklet and applets ready to go, and it just seems like more options can be tabbed through without a mouse than, say, Fedora’s UI (like Bazzite).
I set up Debian MATE for my mom and didn’t tell her it wasn’t Windows, and she never noticed any difference.
Given your tone and general panic, I’m going to say don’t look into Guix. It’s technically interesting, but I don’t think it’s for you where you’re at. 😛
And I mean this with love, not gatekeeping.
I glanced at it and agree!
it’s not that deep bro
What do you mean by the easiest way? For me, that’s pretty simple: backups. In general, it’s a nice idea to have your /home separated (partition or disk), but in reality, I don’t bother. I just do backups. Considering things are mostly in the cloud (e.g. browser bookmarks), the backups are usually just the files, rarely some configs. That’s why I don’t bother separating home even for myself. Most times reinstalling something is not an issue. Actually, rather teaching someone using the interface is more of a problem.
That’s why I wanted to ask why did you choose Mint for your task? I’m trying to migrate one place to Linux off Windows, all they do is basically browser and some printing (I checked, their printer works out of the box with Linux). I settled with Fedora atomic desktop. First I wanted Kinoite, as KDE is very similar to Windows, visually. But I gave it some thought and realised it’s too complicated for a basic use case, and Gnome is just very good and simple, and perhaps it would be just not too difficult to have them learned the new interface. It’s not much after all: the top left corner, plus top right corner to power off the machine. I expect them to get familiar in no time, but I’ll see how it goes over time, as I have just installed the whole thing very recently and haven’t migrated them fully yet. (I have to transfer their files to the new SSD I bought them, before giving them the new system.)
I thought of Mint myself, but I don’t like Ubuntu, never liked Mint, and I thought I’d prefer something more modern. I just have very positive, mostly positive, experience with having Fedora at home, it was mostly great for years, with some occasional inconveniences. But since I’m pretty experienced with Linux, most things could be fixed within minutes. I’m yet to discover how it would work in the wild.
Mint feels modern enough to me yet simple enough for seniors to grasp. I wanted something that could work with their printers immediately, which it did (although I had sure spent several hours getting Wi-Fi and sound to work on one of them, as Mint had kept trying to look for other drivers).
One of my biggest annoyances with Fedora is that you seem to be required to have a mouse to navigate through the full extent of its settings, whereas I think at least a larger chunk of Mint’s settings can be navigated by keyboard, at least in my limited experience (even though the actual main users probably wouldn’t care). Fedora created a popup, I think during sound-testing, that literally could not be interacted with in any way without a mouse cursor that I could find. This is partly why I’m sticking to Mint Cinnamon for even my own machine, plus issues I had with Bazzite (Steam itself ironically never showing a window and only putting itself in the system tray despite what I tried, etc.).
It depends.
If it’s your own sister, then you learn to deal with her. If anything, adding a sister is fine as long as you have the resources. Removing a sister has legal proceedings upfront or after the fact, depending on your method.
Switching between romantic partners who happen to be sisters with each other can be risky! Lingering affection, jealousy, and inadequacy may all come into play here.
Personally, I dated one sister only to find that the younger one fancied me after well after we broke up. I found it difficult to separate the relationships and never pursued it. My brother-in-law dated my other sister-in-law first, and moved to his wife after a mutual understanding.
Finally, romantic entanglements with your own sister is discouraged. Not only is it illegal in many countries, having a child with your sister invites genetic disorders.
lol, fixed all my typos. For context to other readers, “distros” got auto corrected. I’m glad Lemmy lets us edit post titles, unlike a certain giant in the infinitopic forum space…
I saw you fixed it, but the typo brightened my morning.
