Easiest way to change distros after having settled comfortably into one? (lemmy.one)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by Dymonika@lemmy.one to c/linux@programming.dev

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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.

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[-] who@feddit.org 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[-] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

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

this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025

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