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Finally got my mini Mint sorted.
(thelemmy.club)
Tried for half the weekend to get elementary to work, it just refused to install for reasons unknown.
Gone with Mint for now.
I like the hardware (an old Intel MacBook Air) and didn’t want it to go to waste.
I’ll see how I get on with this desktop. Went feet first straight to bare metal because I couldn’t be bothered with dual boot. It was too much faff. Would value any insight from others who’ve found a lovely distro/DE combo with these tiny machines.
Making my first moves away from proprietary software. Thanks largely to being inspired by you delightful folk.
I'm not certain, but personally, I'd try taking a system snapshot with Timeshift and then upgrade to the latest -- unless Update Manager suggests otherwise.
Thanks. Appreciated. Am assuming backup the home folder also.
I’ll be using it as a general browser / social/Lemmy machine but also for just learning Linux, structure, CLI and getting familiar with distros/DEs. Maybe a bit of dabbling in development.
If you've put anything significant in there, yeah, it's not a bad idea to backup your stuff. Timeshift doesn't usually backup the home folder; it usually takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots of system folders.
Mint should do pretty well for your use case, at least as far as learning the Debian side of the family goes. The main drawback to Mint is that it's not bleeding edge -- which is also sometimes a strength. For old hardware, it's generally pretty good; for new hardware, I've had issues because of things like the kernel being too old and not having the drivers I needed. There are ways around that though like using the OEM/HWE kernel releases -- which is what I ended up doing when I put a modern GPU into my ~10 year old desktop.