Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
I don’t have any reason to not trust OP, but the likelihood of this conversation happening at ALL seems incredibly unlikely. Never mind that it is described as successful.
If true, this is amazing.
I mean, it could be possible that the box of the mouse said something like kernel 2.6+. Considering that is older than 2011, OP’s answer was absolutely spot on.
Why is this sweet old lady carrying a mouse around the grocery store asking about decades old kernel versions lol
Put this way… 😂
Old lady uses Linux … what’s your excuse?
muh vibeo ganes
With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).
Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)
As someone who regularly games on a Deck and occasionally uses Nobara on a desktop, it definitely shows, yeah. Incredible how far we’ve come in that regard.
I do still stick with Windows on desktop 90% of the time because unfortunately it seems some of the more advanced NVIDIA features I use very often like DLDSR are unlikely to ever make their way to the Linux drivers, but that’s a petty me problem.
I definitely agree that for the vast majority of users it’s a pretty good experience nowadays unless one can’t make do without the handful of games with unsupported anticheat and such.
Do most newer fighting games work on Linux? I usually play multiplayer games and the anti cheats usually don’t work on Linux, but I’m not sure how modern fighting games are set up.
I play Strive, SF6 and BBCF fine on my desktop linux PC. Had some technical problems with sf6 when I had a Nvidia gpu, but it wasn’t related to anti cheat. Works great with AMD.
Thanks for the info! Would you know if Tekken works? Or how to find out?
Before I decide whether this story is real I need to know what OP looks like that some lady singled him out in public to ask a Linux related question. OP, do you wear a wizard hat in public? Were you buying Doritos and Mountain Dew? I must know.
A robe and wizard hat.
I imagine OP had a neckbeard, belt and suspenders and was carrying a copy of Gödel-Escher-Bach.
Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers.
Next on things that totally happened today…
i worked in sales long enough to know that No, No sweet older lady ever spoke those words to you “setup on linux mint” and include the capacity for understanding hardware compliances? did everyone in the store clap too? but…it would be a nice fantasy ngl
With what I’ve been through, I’m beginning to wonder if OP is telling the truth 😂
About 7 years ago I got a call from some random lady in her 70s. Turns out her husband passed away not long ago and every computer in the house had Linux Mint installed. She needed someone to help her with some various simple techy things that her husband used to handle.
I couldn’t help but wonder how this random lady got my phone number. Turns out that one day, my Grandfather went on a walk down the road and this lady was outside tending to her garden. I have no clue how the conversation shifted to the topic of Linux, but it did. And my Grandpa knew I was in college for Computer Science, so he just volunteered me for this task.
Fast forward to today and I still help her out once or twice a year with whatever random questions pop up.
This makes more sense than OP’s story. If you’re lieing its a good one, otherwise i can believe it
Uh my grandparents have Linux on their machine (set up a decade or more ago after I got sick of cleaning out malware/incredimail installs). They know enough to ask if stuff works on Linux though might not know to ask about Mint/Ubuntu specifically.
TBF they usually ask me first but they’ll also ask the salesperson.
Keep in mind that an older lady to OP might not be that old…
Some sweet older ladies used to work for the NSA like my grandma, and she only had me get rid of her Linux mint partition because she wasn’t using it much
I did once have a very not technical mate ask for some help with their laptop, and it was randomly running edubuntu? I was like yeah no worries I got this but why TF are you running linux, they didn’t even really understand, apparently some random friend had set them up with it because they didn’t want to pay for windows lol.
edubuntu
An education focused Ubuntu distro, weird. Also getting into Linux because it’s free is a great reason to get into Linux, if you get comfortable with it now it can help you in many STEM careers in addition to your own needs and proposes.
This is both very likely true while also being the peak male Lemmy user fantasy that will confuse future alien archaeologists the most. Thanks for sharing!
Mouse? Sure. Those are standardized and interchangeable. 99.999% chance of success.
Graphics card? Wi-Fi interface? Now you’ve got problems.
My experience is still a good success rate there. Back in ~2015 my family got an USB WiFi card which needed an out-of-tree module, which the manufacturer had on Github, complete with DKMS instructions. It was upstreamed after about a year, though!
The only completely unsupported device I’ve had is my laptop’s fingerprint sensor.
You won’t be having such a good experience with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom and NVIDIA have nothing but contempt for the Linux community.
Graphics card is generally ok if it’s AMD, and Nvidia is also ok with a bit of extra with. Intel I’ve never used anything that wasn’t built in.
For wifi, Intel or Atheros cards are high chances of just working. Some other stuff can be hit or miss but I’ve found most recent USB adaptors are ok.
Even then 99% of the time it’s just installing a single package to fix it. Just gotta check the lookup table on the wiki
I’m afraid that’s not true. Attempting to use an NVIDIA GPU will cause problems. You can kinda-sorta mitigate some of them, kinda-sorta, but not really, and the web is filled with people complaining about said problems.
Man I must be lucky or something, not 1 problem with my NVIDIA GPU. Tho more likely I picked the distros that had better NVIDIA support.
Must be. Once I started having problems with NVIDIA on Linux, I swore off all NVIDIA products and never looked back. Zero tolerance for that nonsense.
I think it’s gotten better in recent years. Years ago when I was trying to switch to Linux I had an NVIDIA 750 GTX Ti, back when it was the first Ti card and required the absolute latest drivers. Ubuntu’s repos didn’t package those drivers and Nouveau didn’t support it, so I had no choice but to install NVIDIA’s drivers manually. Then every time the kernel updated the drivers were effectively uninstalled and my system was unusable until I reinstalled the drivers manually. That experience led me to switch to AMD for the next card I bought.
About a year ago though I switched back to NVIDIA for the AI capabilities and I’ve had an absolute flawless experience with it, despite using (or because of?) Arch.
I worked retail in electronics for quite a while and all the linux people I encountered were turbonerds for the most part. Thankfully I think that is changing. I imagine this lady had one of her family members set her up of course.
Reminds of Penthouse Forum stories.
Hey, thank you again, OP.
I’ll take “Stories That Didn’t Happen” for 500, Alex.
Assuming this story is true, Linux is going to be a nightmare for that woman. It’s come a long way, but it’s still not as dead simple as it needs to be for non-technical elderly people.
