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Over the past month, I've put Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" on 4 machines and all the owners are happy (with one of them being me) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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Some of these machines literally took 5 minutes to get from boot to watching a YouTube video, and now they can do so in a fraction of that time.

I'm super-interested in helping people reduce e-waste in my community now, and am wondering about how to go about advertising my willingness to help strangers restore their old/slow/Win11-ineligible machines. I wish I got over the fear of OS-wiping years ago!

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[–] 8 points 10 months ago (6 children)

You can organize Install Parties! I held two of them and I expect to hold one more in the beginning of the year, I had a lot of fun and people were happy to install themselves and learn a new way to use their computers.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Would you be willing to share advice on how to make this happen and any promotional stuff (flyers etc)? I've been wanting to do this in my local area but am not sure how to publicise it.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

    I organized it in a third place (not sure about how it's called in English, "tiers-lieu" in french), they did most of the communication. I also gathered e-mails of people interested on foss and related subjects during other events and I send them e-mails everytime I throw an event.

    There are some initiatives like End of 10 which gather local organizations that might throw install parties, that can help being visible. There are probably others but it depends on where you are.

    On the practical level, we prepared a quick slideshow that we run in the beginning to show people why they'll love linux (talking about free software philosophy, and why proprietary is not a good idea) and then we have half a dozen Linux mint keys that we share with everybody and we all run the install at the same time.

    We also bring a couple more keys, like a gparted and/or debian live just in case we need to do some recovery.

    Most of the people completely switch from windows to Linux but we had a couple of dual boot. We also had one impossibility due to the person wanting a dual boot and their PC using a weird RAID controller preventing us to repartition the disks, or install grub, I don't remember.

    Anyways, it has been a lot of fun and I recommend anyone competent to try, it's really nice to bring linux to more people!

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    That's great, thank you :) Yes, it is "third places" in English. Do you still have access to the communications they sent out as well as your slideshow? I have graphic design skills and I can read French well enough to reformulate them. Merci!

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    • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    The only thing I've run into on one of my machines is getting it to not let the lan go to sleep. My jellyfin server runs mint and it doesn't have any issues falling asleep, but I was going to move some of my stuff to another machine so that old laptop wasn't having to take all of the work and the second one seems to want to sleep even after modifying the config.d file. I must have overlooked something.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 10 months ago

    Yeah, Mint makes the screen of an old iMac that I put on it go bonkers whenever it wakes up from "suspension" (which is apparently the Linux term for sleep); it becomes extremely bright with horizontal lines until the machine is restarted. I guess I could have tried to diagnose that... hmm.

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    • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    Linux makes computer stuff fun for me

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    [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (2 children)

    yeh, but will my sea worthy version photoshop run on it? 🏴‍☠️

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    I'm not a sudo apt master. I don't know shit about terminal or making Linux do stuff beyond wanting to point and click. Yes, it can run a sea worthy version of Photoshop.

    Let me break it down. I use a program called Lutris, installed from the software manager. Its technically a game launcher to collect all your games in one convenient area, letting me launch steam, gog, etc from one library. I install plenty of windows programs and obscure ones if I need them for my research. MaxQDA, SPSS for instance.

    There are few, if any, normal day-to-day use cases where Windows is better. Gaming, thanks to Proton, is not a problem. Drivers? Got those too. But what about x software? There's a less bloated FOSS or low cost version out there.

    Just go for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Thanks man, this is a great answer, I guess Ill have to give it a go. I love to use hard to find art software to and mosh it all together, so that's always been the big hold up with linux for me, plus win11 ltsc iot is pretty awesome, it didn't even come with the snipping tool, much less ai, but I know eventually I need to switch. I did recently set up an openmediavault server, which was at times frustrating (due to what turned out to be a bad external hdd case..), but also rewarding. It's been running really well ever since.

    manjaro kde was awesome last time I tried it, so Ill prolly give that a go again.

    Thanks again!

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