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.
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.).