I will say, the differences from Microsoft in LibreOffice are often not subtle; very simple documents will probably be fine, but you run into a lot of formatting issues on complex existing documents. Unless they already use LibreOffice or they don’t have a lot of pre-existing complex-formatted documents, don’t put them on LibreOffice.

Other than that, the use case should be mostly fine then. Just be careful; as I tend to run into myself, it seems it’s been so long since you’ve run Windows that you’re going to underestimate the learning curve.

I just realized a few things to check, though. I don’t think CPU or GPU support on Debian should be an issue (and if it is, backports kernel and Mesa would solve it), but check Wi-Fi modem and camera support before you install.

Like others have said, let them know what they are getting into, what programs they like to use, etcetera. If they’re mostly web-browsing, they’re probably fine and only need to be shown how to install updates, but if they need full on MS Office, Adobe products (don’t try to sell me on “Abobe is obsolete because of our glorious agentic AI liberators” who are just as bad as Adobe), any other Windows-only software that doesn’t run well through Wine, or just anything beyond a web browser in general, they have to be prepared to learn Linux.

Personally, I would recommend KDE over MATE. I’m an XFCE fan myself, but KDE has a lot more features and I think is overall a lot more intuitive and user-friendly to noobs from Windows; MATE’s a bit more niche. I had my younger sibling using KDE and Debian 13 on an old laptop for a few months after their main laptop broke.

If you want a Windows program for creating USBs, use Rufus. Otherwise, dd works most of the time. I have occasionally turned to Etcher for particularly tricky ISOs, but I hear it has some privacy issues.

As others have said, I think the last computers without UEFI were from somewhere around 2009-2011; I had a laptop from 2012 with UEFI. For most purposes, you’ll probably hardly notice the difference between BIOS and UEFI; only big differences are:

• You might have a GUI now (most Lenovo products have had it for years, but I think I’ve seen a couple lower-end ones with BIOS-style TUIs)
• Instead of boot sectors and MBR, we use GPT (no connection to you know what) and EFI partitions; usually, any competent distro (including Debian, which I use) will set it up for you.
• If the USB is mysteriously not booting, you might need to disable secure boot. It’s not as common of a problem with major distros like Debian, although I feel like I may had issues with the live installers like you’re planning to use.

Might I ask which:

1. Which Thinkpad? (CPU model and graphics would be helpful)
2. What resolution and refresh rate of monitor?
3. What does the trackpoint do during this? I know you said it’s not the mouse, but I’m just curious.

If it’s a modern-ish Thinkpad (like ~2018 or newer), these problems are weird and I have no advice to offer, but if you’re one of those guys who daily-drives a Core 2 Duo Thinkpad, I’m curious how they do when hooked to a 4K monitor.

And it was discovered with an LLM by some “vibe coder” (please hold your nose while pronouncing) with curly blonde hair, empty blue eyes, a business degree, and horrible political opinions. In addition, he talks your ear off about the inevitable glorious agentic AI future and how nobody needs RAM and that all resources in the world should be used towards bringing this future to past, with his response to most arguments against him being something along the lines of “resistance is futile”.

1. Alpine is still a Linux distro, just a lighter one. Also, busybox is a set of standard utilities as an alternative to coreutils; I have no idea how it’s particularly relevant here.
2. The thing is, I’m not using only Docker. I also use native nginx as a reverse proxy, for which I like Debian’s defaults, as well as SyncThing, which are both well-maintained packages in Debian. Also I kind of prefer glibc distros. While glibc kind of sucks, so much stuff I like using prefers or requires it; for instance, last I saw, mDNS/Avahi resolution on BusyBox was kind of a pain in the rear.
3. Most of what I use Flatpak for isn’t network-facing or opening unverified files anyway; the most important applications I do run the native Debian version. Honestly, truth be told, you are correct that I do often prefer native versions and will run the native Debian package if possible (and considering the current age of stable, a lot of them really aren’t that old; Inkscape is basically still the latest version, for instance, while Firefox is always kept to the latest ESR); at some point, though, I do find a Debian package that is too behind to do what I do (though rare, TBH), and despite some issues with Flatpak, at the end of the day, I need to just get a piece of software installed and get on with my day. In that case, I just do a Benjamin Sisko:

I think I have a prototype of a browser extension somewhere on my computer whose only function is to hide the comments button on Phoronix.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and containerization (as well as Debian often being well-supported by upstream projects for script or package-based install), I feel like the age of Debian packages isn’t that annoying anymore; anything important gets security patches, and it’s easier than ever to use 3rd party software without breaking your system. I will add that Debian seems to be much better these days at making sure either a reasonably up-to-date version ships with a release (and can be kept secure during a stable cycle) or not shipping it at all as to allow the user to install it themselves.

I remember back in just 2021 when it took months after Firefox ESR 78 went EOL for them to update Bullseye to 91; recently, it only took them a few days after 140’s EOL to switch to 153 (and 91-115 and 115-140 happened without much note either), which isn’t perfect, but much better than it was.

If you need to install it on a new laptop, backports often has you covered. I ran a backports kernel for about a year on Debian Bookworm to get my laptop’s Wi-Fi modem working; I was able to quit using the backports kernel once Trixie came out.

No, not until 2027. I don’t really know why this meme was posted at this exact moment.

Eh. They’re actually pretty on top of security patches for pretty much any internet-exposed server software.

The OpenSSL incident was a long time ago at this point.

Uploading a gz source archive to a Git repository is absolutely cursed. Still, looks like a cool project.

I’ll also add that if you do enable SSH and are stupid enough to expose port 22, then at least make sure you have key-based authentication instead of password authentication and keep your keys safe.

I could never get Gnome Network Displays to work, but it’s worth a shot.

Looks like that site is dead and has being an AI slop domain squat.

XFCE!

In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I’d choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.

Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be… weird. Like, I don’t quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it’s very opinionated and doesn’t like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.

I think KDEnlive is good as well, definitely the least terrible FOSS one. I never used Premiere Pro on that advanced a level, but for basic effects, keyframes, and title cards, it does quite well.

The main proprietary, “professional” one on Linux is Da Vinci Resolve, but I’ve never used it on Linux, since KDEnlive is just fine for me.

Honestly, in my opinion, every video editor is terrible to some extent; it’s having to deal with enormous amounts of data every second more than almost any other program on a computer, and even a semi-usable editor is a mind-bogglingly impressive feat.

Of course I don’t mean those art-stealing cannibals over at Adobe allowing them, I mean the Wine software allowing them, as it semantically implied.

Like I said, I wouldn’t touch Adobe with a 39.5 foot pole, but Photoshop is unfortunately necessary in those relatives’ industry, so getting on a high horse and telling them to use GIMP or Krita is not going to accomplish anything.

I’ve gotten used to GIMP and used it for a lot of cool thing (especially G’MIC for getting CD liner note scans looking quite good), but it’s just not a solution for serious professional use.

Not necessarily. It’s often less Calc’s capability that is at issue, and moreso its compatibility with imported sheets. Calc tends to have every feature I need when I make a spreadsheet.

I think the main issue I’ve seen is when people need bug-for-bug (or nearly so) compatibility with VB macros.

I personally never want to touch anything Adobe ever again, but for my father’s and grandfather’s use cases, they still need it, so if it ends up working well, maybe it’ll finally allow them to use Linux.

True. At my tech helpdesk, I’ve seen people who keep their Macs on very old versions even if their hardware supports much newer (and non-Tahoe) versions and suffer problems because of it.

For instance, the other day, a woman’s Microsoft Office quit working because she was still on Ventura, which no longer gets security updates. This was on what I believe was a 2022 Macbook.

I think something is seriously wrong with Apple’s update system. I mean, the Windows approach is objectively wrong, but automatic update systems need to be at least a bit aggressive.