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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 (5 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)

[–] 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

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