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Refurbishing an old ThinkPad for a friend -- Debian, Fedora or something else? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz to c/linux@sopuli.xyz

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I'm trying to set up a Linux laptop for a friend who lives in another city. They have only ever used Windows, and likely won't have easy access to fix issues (not that I'm an expert).

First off, is it a good idea to give them a Linux PC at all? Have others had good/bad experiences giving technophobes Linux?

Secondly, if I go ahead with it, what's a good, stable, "safe" OS for a beginner? I'm shy of anything that's a rolling release (e.g. Arch, Manjaro etc) as "bleeding edge" can break things more often than not. I'm leaning towards Debian or something Debian based. But I've also heard good things about Fedora.

If I was the one using the PC, I'd have installed Fedora, as I've heard it's well-maintained. Then again there's been some good buzz about Debian 12. What would your advice be? Thanks!

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[–] darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do they plan to do with it? Just browse to gmail/facebook/etc? If so, really anything with a web browser that can stay up-to-date and they should be fine. LTS releases are good in that case.

If anything more than that, then might have to be a bit more selective with the distro.

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Based on my understanding, primary uses:

Read research papers (PDFs). Annotations functionality is a must (includes highlighting, commenting etc).
Write university essays, including formatting, academic citations etc. I'd personally stick to Libre Office but realistically, they're gonna use the MS Office suite. So I'd like to either have MS Office offline on the machine, OR let them use the on-line version easily.
Listen to music fairly regularly, so Spotify is a must.
Easy access to banking, finance etc.

Secondary uses:

Streaming-wise, they occasionally use Netflix but mostly stream via one of "those websites" if you catch my drift
They also like to use a VPN, which I can help set up (I'm planning to use my own OpenVPN instance)
Social media, i.e. Gmail, FB etc.

So yeah, I think the ideal situation would be one that easily allows:

Using MS Office
Using Adobe (I'd have used Okular personally, but it's annotations are utterly inaccessible if I share my Okular-annotated PDF with an Adobe user and vice versa)
Browser for everything else (I'll likely give them Brave)

[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure you can't run the offline MS office on a Linux computer, even with the recent breakthroughs in the wine/proton area.

While the online in-browser 365 worked fine for me, I've found it quite limited. LibreOffice has some compatibility issues documents going back and forth between it and Ms Office.

I usually don't use any "* Office", but when I must, one software that works quite well for me is OnlyOffice

[–] darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party 2 points 1 year ago

O365 usually works fine for the online portion on most browsers, so that should be okay for their use. And won't require them to change habits in terms of how to use the software. (Bonus: cloud storage of their documents.) Only downside is they'll likely need an active internet connection to do anything
This one is tricky. I've had mixed experience getting newer Adobe products running in Wine, but it's been awhile for me so I'd say try it yourself. There are probably a bunch of good FOSS/cloud options available nowadays too if annotating, commenting, etc that maybe others can elaborate more on
Easy peasy, Brave does work well and should help them avoid malware on "those websites"

I'd say any LTS release you can get a working setup of Adobe in should be fine for them. 90% of what they're going to do is probably via a browser so it's OS-agnostic. I'm fond of Debian since it's very stable, but it comes with the drawback of older packages as time goes on, though you can pull in repos for more recent stuff for most important things.

[–] Torchwood@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

From those requirements especially MS Office & Adobe they should stay on window.

If its as old as a t400 they will struggle with modern browsers & high modern web 3 websites full of JS frameworks which might cause problems with o365

The pdf requirements mean your gonna have to do a lot of configuration & program selection especially for annotation

[–] AmoldyBuffalo@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Not likely you'll get anything adobe or microsoft running at all well. If those two things are absolutely essential, then maybe your friend should stick to windows. If alternatives are okay, OnlyOffice has very good ms office compatibility. On the adobe side... There's really nothing with the same kind of feature set.