I just read an alarming number of comments on a distro-inquisitive post about how evil Canonical has been. I had no idea that Canonical wants to put ads on the desktop; I saw literally no sign of even the name anywhere at all, but reading this and seeing people say that Ubuntu shouldn’t even be an option any more has got me concerned about Canonical going Microsoft-like in telemetry.

Unfortunately, I just installed Mint Cinnamon in the weeks prior on the computers of some very non-tech-savvy seniors before reading these. If all/any of this is true, how do I move people who are already settling their personal info into their current build of Linux Mint? Someone said that LMDE is behind in various ways, including NVIDIA graphics drivers, so that’s not preferred, either. I’m interested in atomic/immutable Fedora Kinoite for myself, at least.

  • rozodru@pie.andmc.caEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    regardless if you switch distros or not it’s good practice to backup stuff to either a personal server or even a private git repo.

    I distro hop every so often, heck just did it lastnight, and what makes it easy for me is using borg which backs up daily to my server. It backups personal files, ssh stuff, and some dotfiles. I also do a push to my private forgejo before hopping and that will be configs and what have you so when I’m on a new distro it’s just a matter of cloning that private repo and then accessing a recent borg backup and i’m good to go. For Arch based distros I use something called DCLI which backs up a list of packages I have installed so I can pull that down and then merge it to my system and it automatically installs the packages I want. All of this allows me from once spending a couple hours setting up a system to now a few minutes. Doing all this makes distro hoping a non factor for me.