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 parents moved to Linux on their own accord: Dad just wanted something that stays the same, and doesn’t try to exploit him, so he’s been a happy Debian & XFCE user for about a decade now; Mom never used Windows, so she’s happy with Debian & GNOME I was a Debian user (and developer) back when they switched to Linux, and Debian is where they stayed. Dad’s in IT, so he can manage both systems fine, most of the time. I need to unfuck it from time to time, when Dad decides it is a good idea to try and install the latest LibreOffice Ubuntu arm64 .deb package on his x86_64 Debian oldstable, throwing whatever --force flags at dpkg he can find, but other than that, they have everything they need, are happy with their choices, and need very little support from me.
In my own household, Linux is the only system to begin with (apart from a handful of Android phones we all hate, and an XBox, which is slowly getting replaced by a Linux mini PC). I’ve been a Linux user since late 1996, and I purposefully only bought hardware that works decently with Linux, so setting up scanners, printers and the like are a breeze.
Wife saw my setup, how I operate it mostly with the keyboard (she hates the mouse more than I do!), wanted the same, so I built her something similar (NixOS + Wayland + niri + firefox + geary). She never had her own computer before, but did use Windows at work from time to time. She didn’t want to use it on her laptop, though. She wanted something tailor built for her, for her very reluctant computer-usage. So Linux it is! She doesn’t hate it, which is the best I can accomplish with anything computer-related when it comes to her. I’m maintaining her laptop, but that too, requires little work. I just update it from time to time. She’s loving that she can send a print job from her laptop, from the living room, to the printer in my work room.
Kids played with both the xbox, and the gaming mini pc I built, and much prefer the latter, because it is easier to navigate, it is faster (using cheaper hardware), it is more stable, so when they’re old enough to get their own computers, they want Linux too, and I shall abide. Luckily, while schools around here are rather windows-oriented, they have to accommodate Linux users too, so the kids will be more than fine with their Linux computers, even for school tasks. Whether they’ll end up maintaining their computers or not remains to be seen. If they want to, I’ll teach them how to.
I’m jealous of your Linux friendly family 😅
My kids only knew Linux from the first day they used a computer.
They didn’t have any difficulty transitioning between that at home and the chromebooks or windows desktops the school had.
My wifes old laptop died and I got an ancient gaming laptop from a colleague and put Linux Mint on it. It works great.
She uses it for studying and some light gaming (Stardew Valley). It just works. She never used Linux before but had zero issues using it and she even said its just like Windows, just faster.
Replaced on old windows install on living room media pc with popOS. Newer hardware, just didn’t make sense to run such a vulnerable and outdated os any more and I wasn’t about to pay for a new windows version for it. A few choice apps linked in the dock, and the main streaming websites bookmarked on homepage in the browser, and we are golden. No issues making the switch really, apart from occasional Bluetooth hiccups with the combo wireless keyboard/trackpad that drives everything. To be fair, Bluetooth occasionally has a meltdown on windows or Mac as well, so I don’t think this detracts from a successful conversion. The end result is actually much more stable and approachable for the whole fam, so quite happy with results.
Early this year, I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Linux Mint.
Very old, low power desktop, it was already running super slowly with Windows.
It’s been great, the computer is much more responsive now, everything works just fine. Browser is the same, Spotify app from the store is great, printer/scanner, icons on the desktop, their ultrawide monitor, it all #justworks.
I also don’t have to worry now about my dad clicking every weird and sketchy email link and ad.
Automatic updates are set up, and Timeshift snapshots are too, in case something breaks and needs rollback.
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.
Other than printing, it goes well because they know if they were on Windows or Mac, I’ll have nothing to do with it.
And whats great is my Brother printer provides Linux drivers, ever since I switched off of HP Printers things have been great!
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”
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.
Both parents are on openSUSE KDE. They only use the web browser and printer, so it pretty much doesn’t matter what UI they use, but it really helped with their acceptance that KDE not only works similar to Windows, it was a clear upgrade from Windows 7, with it looking more modern and being a lot faster.
I also like openSUSE for this, because YaST allows me to administer their PC without cracking out the terminal for everything. It just gives them at least a tiny bit of hope that they might be able to do this themselves. And my brother, who’s not a Linux person, has managed to fix things via YaST without my help.
Ultimately, though, I use openSUSE KDE myself, and that’s really important.
If my parents mildly complain about something, I can proactively offer to change that, because I know all the settings of KDE and YaST.
Or if I don’t know whether there’s a setting, I can go digging for it on my system.But perhaps most importantly: “This Linux thing isn’t working.” – “Hmm, it’s working on my system, so there’s gotta be a way to fix it.”
That immediately shuts down any negativity, so I can concentrate on fixing it, rather than deflecting their grumbling.My mom got my XPS9350 i used to bring to uni, and at the moment, it has Fedora in it.
She repeatedly claimed it was a lot more straightforward for her to understand, compared to the endless inconsistencies and issues on Windows. All things considered, she is fairly tech illiterate too.
Plus it’s easy for me to remote into, in case something breaks
Switched my parents from an iMac to an old Dell Optiplex running Elementary OS. It worked pretty well but there were some glitches with Pantheon DE and OS version upgrades required a reinstall, so I switched them to Fedora after a couple years. It’s easier for me to support because I run Fedora on my laptop. Everyone’s happy now. There is always some amount of tech support to do but lately it has been very low. I even helped my dad upgrade the RAM over the phone once, that was fun.
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.
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.
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.
