I had the same happen on the root folder on a SATA SSD. The SSD was dying (don’t remember if there was SMART errors, but the dmesg log showed write-errors. I cloned old SSD to a new SSD and haven’t seen the problem since. That was years ago.

When there are multiple consecutive write errors, Linux will re-moumt the partition as read-only to protect the data. (There usually a statement along the lines of “on-error:remount-ro” for the partition in the /etc/fstab file)

There’s nothing wrong with Mint, it’s solid. If it works for you don’t stress about it

The only thing is that it’s based on Ubuntu LTS so it’s packages can be a bit old. Doesn’t really matter much unless you have very new hardware and need the hardware support. Then something Fedora based like Bazzite would be better.

For getting newer software you can use flatpak/Flathub.

Bazzite is also “immutable” which makes it harder to break on a system level, but also harder to tinker on a system level. Mint is a “normal” distribution in that regard. Mint does have Timeshift for taking system level snapshots, on the off chance that an update or your tinkering breaks something. Its worth checking that Timeshift is set up for automatic snapshots

Also its probably a lot easier to handle for performing testing on equal conditions through the tests for all their cards. Sounds like ideally they want to freeze all their versions for at least a quarter of a year or more

I think Mint does this out of the box, but check if Timeshift is set up for automatic backups. It’s meant for system-level snapshots (basically everything outside the HOME-folder), so you can easily revert if an update or something breaks the system.

Also consider some form of periodic external backup of her files and documents in the home folder, to protect against hardware failure.

Oh good point, these are modern times, exFAT is a thing now.

I remember years ago having issues that Ubuntu could mount exFAT, so avoided it ever since. But that was many years ago, with an old kernel.

Word of warning on “Safe removal” of external harddrives: You really want to click “Eject” or “Safe removal” every time before unplugging. This is much more important than on Windows, due to the way Linux handles buffers and caching. A copy operation will be “finished” but still live in the write-cache and not securely written to disk.

NTFS is no problem (But as mentioned earlier in the thread the permission system is different). I usually format all my external devices with NTFS so they’ll work on both Linux and Windows machines without any fuss.