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.

Now the question is: who’s in charge of restaurant inspection on the station? Honestly kind of a Daystrom question.

I feel like on full Starfleet installations (or really any major space-faring entity with bases), with the proliferation of replicators and whatnot, the de-facto health inspection authority is a combination of the Sickbay and Engineering departments, as it just doesn’t make sense to have dedicated on-board personnel or send a dedicated ship on a route to inspect food safety at various bases.

However, there’s the Bajoran jurisdiction on the station complicating things. You’d wonder how food safety is handled in Bajoran space in general; the list of government departments I found on Memory Alpha definitely suggests it’s probably at least de jure someone’s job:

• Bajoran Agricultural Ministry
• Bajoran Archaeological Institute
• Bajoran Center for Science
• Bajoran Executive Committee
• Bajoran Freight and Shipping Authority
• Bajoran Intelligence
• Bajoran Ministry of Commerce
• Bajoran State Museum

It could be possible that supply chain safety is usually de jure the job of the Agricultural Ministry (analogous to the US Department of Agriculture), and then there’s a Ministry of Health de jure responsible for restaurant inspection (or possibly organizations in political sub-departments, for instance, a Rakantha Department of Health).

Of course, considering the state of Bajor, there’s room to be spotty. A lot of this really depends on how unitarian or federalist or the Bajoran government is, although considering the First Minister’s control over agricultural policy (particular Winn’s actions with Dakhur), I would say the Bajoran government probably leans unitarian.

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.

What are you talking about? They have string quartets and plays; even the Cerritos had a pie-eating contest, so I imagine the flagship has to have a lot to do as well. Enterprise chili cookoff, anyone?

I am not a Black Mesa employee! I am a (Carol) Freeman!

Um, what about that time on the Enterprise when he got possessed by some ancient evil and held his family at gunpoint and was this close to killing them?

Or that time he had to deal with his former captain trying to start a war with the Cardassian.

Heck, O’Brien had already survived Setlik III long before he was in the transporter room.

Truth is, O’Brien’s life in Starfleet is just one long line of suffering broken by periods of occasional peace.

An ice man!

American medical system be like…

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”.

IIIIIIIIIIIII’lllll TAAAAEEEEEKKKKK YOOOOO HOOOOOOEM, AGAAAAAAAIN KATHLEEEEEN!

Honestly, there’s a point of enlightenment where somehow, this over and over is better than the alternative.

For instance, when I was a kid, my mother once tuned into one of Vegas-area FM radio stations, and they must have been having budget issues because the songs they played real “zingers” like some weird late 80s/early 90s version of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” with a robot announcer and “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree”… sung by Elmo from Sesame Street.

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:

Luckily, I know he’s probably fine because he literally just toured, although crazy non-health-related things can still happen; John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants was this close to getting taken out in a car crash back in 2022. He broke multiple ribs and their already-delayed-from-COVID tour got pushed into 2023; he’s doing better now (although I imagine still dealing with crap) - I saw TMBG in 2025, and am hoping to see them again in 2027.

Weird Al and the TMBG Johns are all about the same age, so I’m really worried they’ll all die at about the same time some time in the 2030s or 2040s and leave me devastated; mostly hoping that Al’s vegetarianism means he lives longer than TMBG so I don’t have to face it all at the same time.

I turned in my early ballot back on October 30th.

Mostly glad for the national results (holy frick, Texas!), although a few bad propositions passed in my state, and my congressional district stayed red where most of the rest of the state went more blue than usual. At least I kept an idiot out of the governor’s office.

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.