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?
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 :)
I have a Fedora Workstation (i.e. Gnome) desktop, a Fedora Workstation laptop, a Windows 10 laptop I’m forced to use for work.
My wife doesn’t have a PC (well I guess she has a Steam Deck, actually, but it only ever goes into desktop mode in order to install/update Stardew Valley mods).
My daughter has my old laptop, with Mint on it.
No issues so far.
My dad did have a laptop with ElementaryOS on it, but since he bought an iPad the laptop has just been gathering dust.
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
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.
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.
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…
I used to provide tech support for the family, and tried to move them to Linux to make them easier to support (similar simple use cases)
Thry weren’t interested so now requests for help get a genuine “Sorry, I don’t use Windows so I can’t help”
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.
I tried it once and got ignored like a beggar trying to talk with randoms on the street.
Kept my parents’ desktop running for 14 years with Debian, XFCE, and the occasional hardware replacement. Maybe a bit of a PC of Theseus scenario but it worked pretty great.
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.
I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.
She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.
Told my wife and kids they can run whatever they want if they don’t involve me. If you want me to help with computer issues then I’m installing Linux.
If you don’t want that, you better learn how to computer because you’re on your own
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.
I don’t think my kids have ever used a Windows machine. I have a couple of machines at home that both run Linux Mint and they use Chromebooks at school. There is not much software that they need that is not either a web page or also available natively.
I needed to update my parents old NUC from Win7, it was either new hardware to run Win10 or give Linux a try, I told them I had been running Linux since 09 full time and it isn’t any harder than running Windows.
I said how about you give it a go for a month or so and see how you go.
I installed Mint, it has been a few years now and no real issues beyond taking a while to get the printer working. I installed rust desk for remote assistance which I have only used 3 times since install.
My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it’s enough for their use. They’re both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!
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?
