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What are some preparations you think people should know about in advance of migrating to Linux? (reddthat.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/linux

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For example, I saw a post the other day detailing how to set up a Brother laser printer on Kinoite. That's not something I would have initially considered a potential problem to be solved. Another I ran into some years ago had to do with an Edimax WiFi dongle that used some weirdly specific Realtek 8812 radio, for which you had to set up the driver via dkms. A little prep and knowledge in advance would have saved days of searching online.

I've started a personal to-do list of things to research and make sure I have all my ducks in a row before I make the full-time switch on my main desktop, so besides the usual "back up your files" advice, I'm hoping y'all can point out some QoL things I and others may often miss!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In the future you could have him make an image of the old device and move it over. That would allow him to keep all data and configurations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but:

he never upgrades anything. He's not computer savvy; that computer hasn't been updated in years. IME, the longer the time between upgrades, the more chance of breakage. This way, he got an up-to-date install.
the drive sizes are different, and I wasn't about to try to walk him through resizing a partition and filesystem over the phone
there was very little he needed to keep from the old computer. He didn't install software; it's a web browser terminal
it wouldn't have helped the biggest problem we had, which was getting into a BIOS I didn't know and couldn't see, and changing it to boot from the USB stick. We'd have had to do that to do an image replication either way

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

He needs to be installing security patches. You can setup automatic upgrades in software updater.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In Mint? That's good to know, thanks. As long as it's fairly reliable; I don't want to be trying to remotely debug a computer that won't boot because of a middle-of-the-night update.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I haven't had an issue but obviously it isn't impossible. Ideally we should have automatic role back after failure but that is not something that is widely supported.