Greetings, I am asking whether Linux has helped your family or not going from Windows to a friendly distribution that caters to young or elderly.
How was your experience with helping relatives or your kids with Linux? Was it because of an older spec machine? Costs etc?
I helped get my grandmother (dad’s side) to move from windows 8.1 to Linux Mint which so far has been good, she only really browses and required some basic budgeting apps.
This was on something like an older core i3 or i5 but I didn’t hear that many problems apart from getting drivers for her Epson printer to work.
So how has it been for you?
I set up Lubuntu for my mom on an old laptop because it couldn’t handle mint. She liked that it felt new and familiar enough, but she didn’t love it enough to not go back to Windows when she got newer more powerful laptop.
My wife is still on Windows on her own laptop. But for watching TV, she has been using Linux successfully with an appropriate GUI (vdr, mythtv, Kodi, Androidtv…) for 15 years or so :)
Not Windows, but I rooted/cracked an old Chromebook for my mother and put Gallium OS on it because newer ChromeOS wasn’t suported anymore. She was able to take care of affairs with it when my Dad passed and uses it daily still to keep in touch and manage her life. 90% of what she does takes place in Firefox, so as long as an OS has that and some basic utilities like a calc and text editor, she’s good to go.
A $150 laptop bought in 2013 still able to accomplish modern tasks. It makes me sick thinking of the throwaway society we have created. When I pass by the neighborhood dumpster and see an entire perfectly fine big screen LCD TV with just a couple bad capacitors in the power supply. When I see entire vapes with batteries littering the ground. When Microsoft decides to arbitrarily kill off an entire previous generation of PCs with TPM.
Thanks for mentioning GalliumOS! I’ll be putting that on my SO’s old Chromebook now.
https://wiki.galliumos.org/Welcome_to_the_GalliumOS_Wiki
Unfortunately, looks to be discontinued, I just checked. I guess I gotta check up on my mom’s laptop and get her something that’s still getting updates haha. That news totally slipped by me.
Don’t get me started on dispo vapes, the absolute worst. The juice is all bad, and the single use sucks. Much better to get a refillable pod system, even better to make your own juice but even if not, the stuff in the bottles is better than the stuff in the dispos.
I can’t imagine switching everyone in my family to Linux. I think it’d be too much to support lol.
For me it was the opposite. Windows required too much support. It didn’t do what they wanted it to do and bad updates inevitably caused problems. With Solus Linux everything became easier for them.
My wife is still on Mac OSX, but my son has embraced Mint. I’m a bit cheesed off that there aren’t (obviously) many kid friendly programming tutorial resources, other than maybe getting a sub to codeacademy. Other than that, all good.
My first introduction to programmimg was Scratch when I was ~10 years old. I can’t think of any more child friendly resources than that.
My SO runs Mint on one of her older laptops, and aside from an audio driver issue, I’ve had no problems maintaining it, and she finds it pretty user friendly.
No point imo, the people who benefit significantly from using Linux are the people who understand what it is
I try to get my techy friends on Linux and much of my family are techies anyway but I wouldn’t try to put someone who won’t be able to fix it themselves on it because then they’re stuck if I’m not around to fix it
I think there’s a lot of people who would be happy with a Chromebook in computer form, and those are also the market for Linux.
Modern distros are very resilient as long as you stick to the big ones, maybe even more than windows. There’s plenty of benefits for regular people too. A few off the top of my mind, the OS doesn’t have ads, no privacy minefield, less malware. Gotta keep in mind that at the end of the day, most people only use their pc to open the browser.
At which point the safer bet is to get them a Chromebook which is supported by Google and not by you
Chromebooks are a privacy nightmare and have shitty lifespans though. It’s a poor comparison too because at this point you’re buying new hardware instead of installing different software.
That sounds like the non-techies would be able to fix it themselves on Windows without you being around, which in my experince isn’t the case.
It might be different for you with a lot of tech-affine people in your family. But for those of us being forced to be the tech support anyway, it can really make a difference if you have to fix a Linux issue once in a while or have to reinstall Windows for the 5th time this year…
My stepmoms aunt had a super slow laptop with Windows that I took and installed Linux Mint on and she is super happy with it. It’s like a brand new computer for her!
She only uses her computer to pay bills and check Facebook and she haven’t called me once to complain. She only tells me that it’s working great.
I plan to install Linux Mint for my mom too in the future. I don’t think my dad would be able to handle it tho. He barley know his way around the computer but he knows enough to do his work and I don’t want to mess up his workflow.
Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.
Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.
Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.
Care to share what parental control you are using on Linux?
I’ve been running Linux on my laptop for a few years now (started with Mint, on Manjaro now). I have our HTPC set up with Mint, and the family is good with it. When my kids are old enough for their own, I’ll probably keep them going with Mint as well, we’ll see.
My wife’s laptop still has Windows, but I’ll likely move her over if she gets a new PC at some point.
I tried it once and got ignored like a beggar trying to talk with randoms on the street.
For me the most important thing was to use Threema/Signal instead of Whatsapp in the family groups so I’m trying not to pressure everyone to jump on the Linux boat.
I converted my fiancé’s MacBook Pro to Linux, but she’s always using her company Thinkpad which has to be on Windows.
My kids have never known anything other than Linux. They had to build their own PCs at 6 years old (under my supervision, of course) and they both originally chose Zorin OS at first. Today my daughter is 11 and runs Kinoite on her PC, and Novara on the laptop she uses for school. My son is 9 and wants to move to PopOS (still on Zorin).
My wife was the hardest sell because she was fully intertwined in Microsoft’s BS. So I built her a Nextcloud server, set her up with Fedora Workstation on her PC (her laptop is still on Windows, but she barely uses it now), and she has never complained once. As a matter of fact, she moved from her PC to her laptop last week to complete some work because she had to be out of the house, and came back telling me that she could not stand Windows anymore, so she didn’t get any work done. Unfortunately, for the local tax entity she needs Excel (ridiculous), so she wants me to spin her up a Windows VM in the same server where she has NC so that she can move her laptop to Fedora as well.
So, yeah, my whole house is Linux run exclusively now.
Our family runs Debian + gnome on all our desktop clients. The kids love minecraft and java version works perfect for their needs. Wife needs Libreoffice, Brave and printing.
I threw my brother and my dad into EndeavourOS and Garuda respectively. So far, they are swimming. My brother even does almost all his gaming on Linux.
(Well OK, apart from my dad generally yelling at everything tech. I guess that’s where I got it from.)
Haha, dunno about Garuda, but EndeavourOS is a tad difficult if you never used any Linux based distro before ! Granted it’s easier to setup and maintain than Arch, but still…
This reminds me of how in the past the swimming instructor just throw you in the pool even If you can’t swim… Some learned the hard way others were traumatized for life.
Saved an old desktop and laptop from the trash by installing mint and Firefox with ublock. The desktop lasted them for years without any problems, and I think the only problem I supported on the laptop over years was the boot mount filled itself up during updates and needed to be cleaned up.
