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?
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 Newer hardware, just didn’t make sense to run such a vulnerable and outdated os any more and I wasn’t about to pay for a new windows version for it.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.
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 niece, my mom, and my cousin are using Linux because I gave them my old laptops with Debian in it. They don’t know how to do anything with the system (not even update it, I do it for them), but they know how to use a browser, or launch a game. Works fine for them like that.
At this point you could have moved them to Mint LMDE, which has GUI tools to to pretty much anything, and it is essentially Debian with Cinnamon and some extra tools built by the Mint team
No, Cinnamon with LMDE it’s slower than XFce on Debian. These laptops were slow and some had only 2 GB of ram.
XFce makes them snappy like when they where purchased back in the days?
Yes, very snappy.
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.
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.
Not Linux but MacOSX.
They all know how to operate their iPhones, which we got them because it was like their iPad; it’s easy troubleshooting: how would you do this on your phone? Well, it’s exactly the same here.
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 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 gives me a sense of happiness when I hear about whole families using Linux only. So awesome.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Unless you install Chrome OS Flex. If we leave aside the privacy aspect, of course
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…
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.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 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 😅
