When I was visiting my wife’s family for Thanksgiving, my father-in-law told me that his laptop was telling him that if he didn’t upgrade to Win11 he be vulnerable to all sorts of malware. They’re both retired and on a fixed income so he was panicking over buying a new machine. I put Mint on his existing laptop and walked him through its use. Fingers crossed that he’ll be able to handle it. I haven’t had any support calls from him yet but I’ll find out how it’s going when I see him in a few days.
Does anyone have any tips for supporting older family members on Linux if they have absolutely no experience with it?
point taken. I see how it can be a good balance of pros/cons.
re: debianland, i’m not sure i understand the question so…
Certain major version of a “traditional distro”, say debian 13 provides fixed list of libraries and apps (which get updated during the lifetime but only to necessary extent). each of those can only depend on a particular version selected by debian. eg. if for libfoo, the provided version is libfoo-1.2, then anyone who depends on libfoo must depend on libfoo-1.2. (if that can’t be achieved before release then that package is simply removed.)
note that two versions of the same package can’t co-exist on the same system. (this is basically true for debianland and fedoraland; because packages share the same filesystem it would be not feasible to make it work without huge amount of added complexity and bug surface. definitely not on a distro-wide level).
honestly i’ve never used backports; I don’t know what process they use to select versions; i would assume that it’s basically on a best effort basis.
personally if i don’t find the stable version new enough, I look for vendor repo, appimage or flatpak (roughly in that order)