LMDE 7 (Linux Mint Debian Edition) released

I'm moving several friends over to linux because of the hilarious shoot-self-in-foot fiasco by microsoft, and I'm using Mint for all of them. Seems the most user friendly coming from windows.

Seems the most user friendly coming from... Arch

LOL that's true!

So this'll be an interesting experiment. Here are the people I'm moving to Mint from win10:

1 - 44 yr old close friend - very tech savvy - mostly used for work - should be easy I think.
2 - his ~75 yr old mother - least tech savvy human being on earth - but only uses computer for solitaire and email, nothing else. I think I can make it work.
3 - 60 yr old close friend - medium tech savvy - laptop is older but works totally fine - I think this is the one I'm most worried about.

Work use-cases can be tricky. Sometimes there's that one particular thing you have to do for work, like you actually need to do surgery on .pdfs that you can't really do without Acrobat Pro, or you actually need some of the weird advanced features in Excel to do with charts and such, or you need exact visual fidelity on the roundtrips between Word and LibreOffice Writer.

That last I believe can be made a lot better if you arrange to get your hands on the Windows fonts and put them in where LibreOffice can see them. Or I guess put some of the fonts you find in Linux into Windows? Anyway, a lot of the trouble with Word on Windows and LibreOffice on Linux documents not looking quite the same is if they don't have the right font and just grab some other one that's available to use instead. That can affect not just how the letters look, but how much space they end up taking up, which will mess up layout. Have the right font and everything will be a lot closer to identical.

Linux Mint aka a working version of Ubuntu. It fixes most of what is wrong with Ubuntu and is actually quite a nice distro. Glad that they have a backup with the Debian edition... But Debian is already a great distro, so I don't see much of a reason to use this over plain Debian. Always nice to have options though.


Last edited by Drakker on 14 Oct 2025 at 9:57 pm UTC

@Purple Library Guy ... huh, I didn't think of the font stuff. And he does a lot of document work currently in office365. Thankfully, the company he freelances for the most has already told everyone they're ending their subscriptions to o365 at the end of the year and they expect everyone to use LibreOffice from then on out and whatever file syncing/sharing service they want. So he was already planning on moving off of office, BUT that is a really good point on fonts. Damn. Thank you though for mentioning it because now I can get in front of that problem!

1 - 44 yr old close friend - very tech savvy - mostly used for work - should be easy I think.

To me, those "very tech savvy" are the worst to convert. People who are ignorant in computers just learn what some icons do and that is enough. For all the rest they ask you. People who have some deeper knowledge on Windows tend to become very cranky moving to Linux, because they are used to be the ones people come for help, now they find themselves to be the ones that need help. And a lot of them move back to Windows because they resist changing.

they are used to be the ones people come for help, now they find themselves to be the ones that need help

i was the one doing Win95, 98, XP and 7 maintenance for the whole family until Microsoft started nagging for Win 7 >> Win 10 upgrades (before EOL)

boy was I happy when i figured just how much less maintenance Linux Mint requires!

auto-updates that apply fast, silently and cleanly?! what is this arcane miracle?!!! 🤨

app configs that i can copy-paste into a user folder on fresh install instead of reconfiguring?! wtf! 😮

what do you mean with "it doesn't run slower after 2 years"?!! 🥹

and my personal favourite: there is no spoon... and no regedit.exe 🤯


Last edited by Marlock on 28 Oct 2025 at 7:41 pm UTC