They have written programs (mostly with python, I think) to move the motors, capture data from the photodiode, and control the laser. The programs work fine as is, and the bottleneck time-wise is the time it takes to get good statistics, not really the efficiency of any of the controls or speed of the data analysis. So, what one cares the most about is that the programs continue working as they do every day they come in. I don’t know if there would be a gain from switching to Debian. What do you think the benefit would be? I haven’t used Mint on my own machines, only Ubuntu and Arch. I know Arch I wouldn’t recommend for something like this because I have had many updates breaking things and having to spend time fixing those, which would not be a good thing to happen during a beamtime!