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edwardianpug OP t1_ivnqg7o wrote

Reply to comment by mgb360 in My 17 year old IBM Thinkpad T43 connecting to the internet at 800+Mbit/s by edwardianpug

Mint is one of the more user friendly versions

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mgb360 t1_ivnugvp wrote

Oh I've tried it, I recognized it immediately. Still end up bashing my head against a wall trying to solve some minor issue that pops up.

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PermanenteThrowaway t1_ivoh3pr wrote

Two years in and I've come to accept show-stopping bugs as just another unavoidable fact of life.

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A_number-1234 t1_iw2hsl3 wrote

Same here. In general it works good, but in some cases it's like they have their priorities backwards, regarding what they make easy. I soon need to upgrade from 19.3 in order to keep getting security updates, but it's a "major upgrade", which is high risk and requires command line knowledge. I can do it, unless something goes wrong (which I estimate to a 40% risk), then I'd need to know every detail about how the system works to troubleshoot and correct it. I always take full disk backups before upgrading, but that will only get me back to the old version, not help me with a successful upgrade...

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mgb360 t1_iw3i9vr wrote

See, that's exactly the kind of thing I mean. There's no reason you should need command knowledge just to update. Really, needing command knowledge to do any basic functions is pretty user unfriendly

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A_number-1234 t1_iw4rwnd wrote

Indeed. It's stupid. Mint is better than many other distros, but I can't say it's good. It has pretty much modern functionality day-to-day-wise (AFAIK, I haven't used Windows 10 or newer much, and Mac not at all), but even things like updating, repairing file systems after not unmounting before disconnecting something, and other necessary but rarely used functions are like Windows 98 level at best - sometimes DOS. If it wasn't for increasing privacy concerns with Windows, I would have stuck with it. Open source philosophy is better, but the current state of the distros I've tried is definitely not. Nor the availability of information, when problems occur.

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mgb360 t1_iw4vn10 wrote

Privacy concerns are a big one. I've been holding on to windows 7 for as long as possible but it's getting to the point that a lot just won't work with it. I'd like to switch to Linux, it's just not easy

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