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 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.
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 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 can’t imagine switching everyone in my family to Linux. I think it’d be too much to support lol.
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
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 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.
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.
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 successful. They don’t even try to understand why I use a “non-standard” OS like a “unicorn” trying to be “unique,” let alone try it.
Hey, why don’t you use your computer like every “normal” person?
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.
I’ve been trying to convince my wife to dump Windows for years, and her question is always the same, “will I still have MS Outlook? No? Then I don’t want it”. Her Windows 10 computer is 9 years old, has never been re-installed and it’s slower than a freaking tired snail…
I cannot imagine someone staying in windows for outlook…
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!
Man, I wish that were the case. I’ve been having a hell of a time with Brother drivers for the last couple years, on various distros. I’ve always highly recommended Brother since they’ve never pulled HP bullshit, but it’s hard to recommend a printer where the driver won’t respect Portrait vs. Landscape settings 90% of the time.
Experience with relatives who had no prior experience with Windows or Linux: installing Linux for them was great, painless and also facilitates troubleshooting for me. No problems here. Mostly using Linux Mint for those purposes, it’s a great distro for non-techy people.
Experience with relatives with prior Windows experience (but no Linux experience): a mixed bag. Some use Linux happily now (thankfully), some returned to Windows because they couldn’t change their habits or have weird specific incompatibility issues with niche hardware which they also don’t want to solve in a different way. I’ve kind of stopped giving support to those, since I don’t want to give Windows support in my free time. I sometimes have to do it work-related, that’s more than enough Windows contact for me. I also refuse to give buying advice on any products by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon or Google, with only very few exceptions (e.g. Pixel phones, because they’re very secure and with GrapheneOS installed they’re the best general mobile phone option). It’s a bit of an ethical dilemma because I’d like to help the people but also don’t want to directly or indirectly support those companies. I always offer them help if they use Linux or the things I recommend.
