I think Ubuntu has a long way to go to “Microsoft levels”, but yeah, some of their actions are why people are less keen to recommend them to new users (and why I don’t myself). As the other person said, Mint is separate to that - it’s a bit like “Ubuntu with the crap removed”.

I did this for my dad, and then his neighbour… and then his other neighbours… also for quite a few older people near where I live.

Anyway, assuming the initial setup goes okay with wifi/printers etc and all the software is present, then it’s pretty much hands-off most of the time - though they’ll likely have 100 tiny questions initially, none of which they feel are “worth troubling you with” - so you may need to nudge them every few weeks a few times, and if possible go over and check things yourself.

There may be a sense of not wanting to bother you, or embarrassment about a mistake, then they just put up with it - for example, accidentally zooming in in the file browser, so all the files are massive, then just putting up with it instead of “bothering you”.

Any solving you do, you can show them where you find the answer/option e.g. teaching them to search the mint forums - but also knowing the Ubuntu ones will mostly work too (and for some things, any Linux ones).

You’ll need to remind them about updating, because it’s not forced on them, and if they’re prevously Windows/Mac users, they may distrust updates. You may also need to be on hand for version upgrades, at least in the first year, depending on how computer-literate they were previously.

It’s worth setting up some sort of backup with them, and setting up autosaves for office programs - then making symlink shortcuts to where those autosaves are kept. Generally you’re looking for ways to undo the panic if things go wrong - “here’s how to reverse it if you lose it/break it”.

Assuming you’re putting an adblocker on, you will probably need to show them how to update it and how to disable it if absolutely required by a website.

Check there’s something in place to transfer photos from their phone/camera etc - or any other use case where they want to transfer things on/off the computer - this might include things like “Calibre” for ebooks, or “Shotwell” for photos for instance.

Other than that… depends on the specific person and what they’re doing.

Generally though, Mint is pretty intuitive, especially if they used older Windowses - so you may find (as I did) there’s almost no support needed once it’s up and running.

Fight Against Fascist Organisations?

NTFS was around in the 1990s, exFAT is from the 2010s - and I think was also caught up in some sort of copyright/proprietary shit for another 10 years. There are brand new 2025 TVs which still won’t read exFAT.

I’m mostly echoing what’s already been said, but I have a preset in Handbrake for this, which works fine on most TVs I’ve tried from the last 10 years (possibly 15 by now) and therefore should have no problem running on any computer. I often (for work reasons) prepare video footage for looped playback on TVs and projectors at numerous places - so “TVs I’ve tried” is a larger number than it might initially sound like.

It’s roughly along these lines (as I appear to have emailed someone about before):

"H264 mp4. 1920x1080. 25 or 30fps, or similar (appropriate to source material). Constant bitrate <=12mbps. 8mbps is generally universally compatible, though you should be able to get away with 10-12mbps on newer TVs with newer USB sticks.

AAC audio 192kbps, though lower is fine.

Use same samplerate as source (i.e. 44khz 48khz etc)

If you’ve got settings for encoding profile, Main and Level 4.0 should work.

If individual files are small enough (<4GB), format the USB stick as FAT32. Otherwise NTFS. EXT2 will work on a lot of TVs, but you’ll have trouble with some computers. Exfat may work on newest tellys, but won’t on anything more than a few years old, so safe option is not to use it."

Because it makes some people (not you or I) hang about the shops longer and buy more things.

I don’t think the rules have changed, so more likely an admin issue than a change in eligibility - I’d probably contact them.

Yeah, I was just having a little joke - I actually have quite a lot of respect for his various environmental/social/other projects… but it’s still quite funny to get a medal from your mum :)

Is the “Queen’s service order” (presumably from his mam) basically just like when my mum gave me a sticker for helping do the washing up?

In a way, I think them saying he’s dead as in ‘irrelevant’ and ‘just a meme’ is probably better than him being dead as in ‘not alive any more’, at least for the time being.

Nobody’s going to try and make him a martyr of anything, just sort of ignore him and occasionally laugh at him.

That said, I feel I wouldn’t be too upset if he expired in prison.

Physically, your local “Cash Converters” or similar may be worth looking at, depending on how you feel about them and that type of business.

Digitally, there’s places that do refurbished laptops, for example Laptops Direct have a refurbished section which I’ve used before on behalf of other people : laptopsdirect.co.uk.

£200 may be a struggle, but under £300 should get you something that’ll definitely do the job.

Depending on what you’re doing, Operating System may be an issue if you want Windows, as they’ve stopped updating 10, and 11 won’t run on older machines. If you want Linux, you’re fine. Do a quick Internet search for the laptop model & “Linux” to check if there’s any issues i.e. a weird WiFi card etc.

Double check with a nerd before you click “buy” (asking a follow up question on here should work).

You may already have the answer from the other comments - but specifically for subtitle transcription, I’ve used whisper and set it to output directly into SRT, which I could then import directly into kdenlive or VLC or whatever, with timecodes and everything. It seemed accurate enough that the editing of the subs afterwards was almost non-existant.

I can’t remember how I installed Whisper in the first place, but I know (from pressing the up arrow in terminal 50 times) that the command I used was:

whisper FILENAME.MP3 --model medium.en --language English --output_format srt

I was surprised/terrified how accurate the output was - and this was a variety of accents from Northern England and rural Scotland. A few minutes of correcting mistakes only.

Just a few small questions, out of interest - would you buy art if it was significantly cheaper, or free? Or would it just be so low on your priority list that it would never be important enough?

If it was very cheap, or free, would you take “whatever was on offer”, or would you still have very particular tastes in what you liked?

Another way of saying “We will not follow legal requirements” is “We will break the law”.

Working fine from mobile phone, Yorkshire. 4G Talkmobile (using Vodaphone’s network). Loaded immediately.

Sadly it’s not just inflexibility of Universal Credit - the base rate of Universal Credit isn’t high enough anyway, but you’ve also particularly got elderly people on state pension only, people with disabilities and people with children.

Surprisingly, the majority of food bank food apparently goes to households with at least one person in work - though this might not be “old style” work where you have set hours and wages and rights, but instead “zero hours” or “flexi hours” or “our company considers you self employed” etc.

Huge increases in gas costs are one of the biggest contributors - children, the elderly and the ill couldn’t manage to just switch the heating off all winter. Ridiculous house price/rent increases are also a massive factor.

I’m also a little unsure about a nationalised supermarket - but there are probably some solutions in this direction that would work.

It’s not the fairest assessment - It has delays as “trains more than three minutes late”. Not ideal, especially when you’re changing trains, but 3 minutes rarely makes a difference, compared to the 10/20/30/40 minutes late ones.

A few years back, when working in places “two trains away”, I was getting trains 10-20 minutes late every day, which normally meant missing the connection.

By my own experience, Northern and Transpennine have had fewer cancellations and fewer noticeably latest.

However, Northern are still shit at sending a two-carriage Sprinter as a commuter train that needs 3-4 carriages for everyone waiting to actually get on.

That can’t be true because he’s medically unable to sweat.

Not, as he likes to say, because of something something Falklands or whatever.

It’s because he’s a lizard-man in a human suit.

Prince Andrew is a lizard nonce.

It’s the good way round.

A Tory had pressured a local school to ban a few books because they showed white-on-black racism as a negative thing, and this fact hurt his racist Tory feelings.

A comparatively large group of anti-racist parents complained, and got the anti-racist book unbanned.

At their heart, most distros are approximately “made of the same stuff”. There’s differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the “software centre” works), but essentially the difference between a “gaming distro”, “normal distro” and “creative distro” is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.

Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.