Even my mother can run Linux
I really dislike feeding the stereotype according to which a young man referring to "my mother" presumes that an older woman must have technology skills that are edging around zero. In this case, however, the stereotype fits. My mother is brilliant, earned a PhD in medieval lingusitics, held a significant position at a major national cultural institution, and inspired me from a young age to be a blazing fast typist. She's not a computer whiz by choice, because she rightly decided that becoming one was not worth her time. As a result, she has no interest wasting her life, as I do mine, by learning new programs or hacking around on the command line. For similar reasons, when her MacBook started breaking, she went to the Apple Store to replace it, but then returned it out of disgust for the commercialism of it all. So she asked me to set her up on an old computer running Linux. Today, we talked through how to use email on Thunderbird, and with a little bit of help she was able to get the old computer, full of nothing but community-created software, to meet her needs beautifully.
So, at risk of feeding the stereotype, it's true: Even my mother can run Linux.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadits magic , i carry USB disk with Ubuntu installation every where to save old laptops ...
My preferred setup is a dirt cheap chromebox, like the Asus for $150 or so. Add 2 4GB dimms and install ubuntu LTS. Drag off all the crap icons for amazon search, libreoffice, etc. Set it to automatically login. Make sure the browser icon is easy to find.
I would spend some time saying that never give their credit card to anyone without talking to you. Or print them out a whitelist with a red circle around what to check for, like https://www.amazon.com or whatever vendors you trust.
But I have been questioning what the best flavor of linux to set up someone who has little to no "technology skills", on. Does anyone have a good recommendation?
I picked ubuntu LTS because it's popular, fairly straight forward, and supported for 5 years. Change can be confusing and it's nice to minimize it and have long enough so you can plan when to upgrade instead of having things randomly change every 6-9 months.
Set autologin, get rid of icons you don't need, and set them up a default homepage and some useful links. I recommend showing them a webmail instead of a mail client which tends to be more complex.
Go over basic safety (one password per site), never giving a credit card number out (or only to trusted sites over ssl). If there's a local LUG (linux user group) it might be worth mentioning.
If they want my help I enable remote ssh (with passwords disabled) and put my key on it. That way I can fix things, see their screen, etc.
It's based on Ubuntu, so you have all of the normal resources that come with one of the most popular distros, but I think elementary is much sleeker.
I wanted something that I wouldn't hate to look at, but didn't have to spend a lot of time configuring to get there. I definitely found that in elementary OS, and I've been a happy user for around 2 years now.
This may be slightly unpopular, but Ubuntu's Unity interface is probably the easiest for a newbie. It has a big dock with big buttons, the search feature is accessible, and it has a relatively tame look. Gnome shell is my favourite, but things are hidden and windows are always flying around. KDE has too many options - too much opportunity for newbies to get confused or to mess something up and not know how to fix it.
Yes. The experience will be the same: you'll have issues sooner or later, and someone on a forum will tell you, why didn't you use one of the other two, or some alternative distro.
- It's based on Ubuntu
- It runs better on old machines than Unity or Genome Ubuntu "flavors"
- I can easily customize the TaskBar/Dock/"Start Menu" to feel like Windows or Mac OS depending where the user is migrating from.
I've seen some friends go with Manjaro or Mint, but I think they both end up raising more "support" questions than Xubuntu (I have no examples at mind now to substantiate why though)
PS: If the user is migrating from Win XP also consider Lubuntu
There's some variants of it that are pretty popular (and use the same software repos but have different desktop environments installed and configured by default), though I half-jokingly wonder if at least some of the popularity of them are from people not wanting to be seen as just settling down on the "noob distro".
I used to use Xubuntu, which is a cracking OS with a GUI comparable to Gnome 2, but I came to like the Cinnamon GUI more than XFCE.
That is the problem with Linux. Of course it's getting better and better but it's not where OSX or Windows is by any means.
I disagree. My 2-year old niece can barely spell correctly but she is able to select the cartoons she likes on youtube using an iPad. How old do you think she'd be until she figures out how to list files in a dir using the cli?
Mind you, no one ever taught her how to use the iPad, she just did.
Right out of my head, I could think of the following skills you need to actively learn to put the command line to use:
- tracking a lot of state in your head as opposed to have all state changes directly reflected on the screen.
- memorizing known commands, flags and microsyntaxes (this is not helped by the essay-like writing style of many manpages and the fact that many commands introduce their own auxiliary concepts that you need to understand before you can use the command)
- finding the appropiate new command for a task you want to do
- memorizing interaction between commands (and the shell) to correctly use pipes, quoting and nested commands (find -exec etc)
- "knowing what you are doing". Many commands are built with the explicit assumption that they are to be used by experts only: If such a command is used wrongly, the consequences can be dire.
A GUI provides significant assistance for all of those tasks and provides opportunities for explorative learning. A command line could do the same but in practice doesn't.
I could have downloaded an entire linux distro and installed in the time it took to do just one Win10 update the other evening.
Don't get me started, my dad is almost 80 and never paid for a micro$oft license in his life, he used to teach maths and computing at the local university, he started with punchcards, PDP8/11 and VMS and never liked windoze and for good reason.
Is this 90s Slashdot?
Had a problem with this quite recently, and solved it by buying a new device. And, since, as you said, a lot of them work on Linux with minimal setup needed, I was able to buy it without any issues. But this does not mean that the problem does not exist.
The solution is to do the research first and only buy what has been verified to work with your flavour of Linux. In many cases, you can simply buy a slightly older product off eBay (or similar).
Personally, when shopping I will ask after Linux support and when the salesperson can't help, I explain that I will only consider the product if it is guaranteed to work. It's a quixotic crusade.
On the other side, old hardware can get a new lease of life thanks to linux.
I have an old scanner (>10y) still working fine 'out of the box' on linux. My brother wanted to borrow it to use it on his laptop, but the scanner is not supported anymore on recent windows.
Also old low-specs computers which were running winXP at first, can still be useful with up to date linux (browsing internet, reading email, using libreoffice, printing documents, listening music, some people don't need much more).
Effectively their computers have become voice controlled appliances, with the voice command parser being Redirectleft...
This seems cool. Can you please tell me how you do it? Some links that I can use to read up on it will do.
1) Every so often, WiFi will fail to detect and connect to my network, so I need to type this command in a terminal:
2) And every third or fourth time the kernel gets an update, I must manually make space on the /boot partition by following the complex instructions here [1].So no, not for my parents, not yet.
[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-s...
Not sure why everyone loves Linux so much. It's a pain to work with.
Instead they grab the neighborhood geek (or should i say nerd, geeks seems to be too cloud oriented these days) and pay with cookies or beer (depending on age of said geek).
What seems to be going on is a mixed message of "hard to admin" and "don't need to admin" (aka "just works" in Mac speak). Meaning that it is rarely if ever about day to day "usage", but rather about being able to admin their own system.
And frankly i think Linux have a leg up there, as things are actually documented and in plain sight (at least until Freedesktop stuff and, their fetish for using dbus for everything, gets their panties in a twist). With Windows and Mac is it all too often some closed up blob going bad, involving magic incantations found in some forum or blob somewhere.
Would that it were so simple.
Unfortunately, there is also "I can't comfortably use my printer/scanner on this". Some manufacturers still don't provide Linux drivers for their devices.
My mother uses Linux too, quite happy with it, but I had to buy her a new printer.
EDIT: a thing I might add here is that I think that for the older generation, a pre-configured Linux desktop can give them that Win95-98-XP experience they want. Familiarity, as you said, is a key factor, and the Metro UI can be much more difficult to get used to for people that put a lot of effort in getting familiar with the 95-XP UI paradigm they used for the last 20 years.
I've set up dynamic DNS and a few other things so I can help them if something goes wrong as we live 12000 km apart. After a year I realized that none of them ever asked me anything. So I asked my dad "Why do you never contact me to help with the computer?". He responded: "Well, everything just runs!".
Before, with Windows, I can't even count the time I've spent fixing their laptop.
It turns out that Linux in general is mom-proof, and can handle email, web browsing, and solitare extremely well. Mom loves the gnome-games games; she has always liked Mahjong, and was amazed that there are that many varieties of solitare! I put them on Mint for about two years, but they're back on Xubuntu.
Another bonus, malware and unsolicited "Windows support" calls are largely, if not completely, ineffective.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3568420
Since the MacBook with Touchbar has only been available since somewhere in November, the new MacBooks are apparently selling quite well.
[1] Though it results in some nice threads that are so surreal that they must be parody:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13379509
(I mean, no one can possibly suggest to a professional Photoshop user that the solution to the lack of support for non-destructive editing is: 'make a copy of a layer before you change it' or 'use git'? :))
I got the 2016 MBP w/Touchbar. I've been plagued with the GPU issues, and the crappy battery life. Add to that issues with PDF corruption, because of Apple's screwing with the frameworks.
It's starting to feel like Apple doesn't care about anything other than iOS devices.
When I buy stuff for myself, I get the highest-spec model, every time. I never want to come up short, if I need the power/storage. $4300 and change on the latest one.
I just ordered one of the new Dell XPS 15" laptops. Again, same thing. The high-end model. More powerful CPU, twice the RAM, better graphices, but half the storage. $1600 less for the Dell.
Starting to think Dell makes a better "Macbook" than Apple. We'll see. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After her old Acer Aspire One fell apart, I bought her a cheap Compaq 15" laptop on Amazon for Xmas in 2014 and installed Mint on it. Since, as is common these days, she uses a web browser more than anything, it was easy to teach her how to connect it to wifi and launch Firefox. Since then, I've heard zero complaints or requests for help. Linux JustWorks. I think she's come to like the Cinnamon GUI as much as I do, too.
I also tried to get my sister to switch - she is a lot fussier, I got a huge amount of resistance switching her to Win7 after XP went EOL since she prefers the GUI. The difference here is that she uses a tablet PC (not a Surface, the original spinning-screen + pen-based digitizer laptop style machine) which she uses for drawing and artwork. To give her credit, she relented and gave Mint a go for a week, with an XP skin on it (which was pretty accurate, all things considered). Unfortunately she couldn't get used to GIMP and there were lots of hardware issues, in addition to old Windows games that wouldn't run under Wine, so reluctantly I put her back on Windows. Still, she at least tried it.
These days, Mint is my go-to. The Win7-inspired GUI is pretty easy to get Windows-only people to learn, and it's up to date and reliable. As their Windows PCs slow down and the OS degrades (I stil swear Windows has a built-in timer for this purpose), I find that my family members are so keen to have working PCs that they don't particularly care what OS it runs, so long as they can find the web browser. I nearly Mint-ified my uncle's old well-abused Acer laptop, until we discovered that nuking the Acer crapware made it usable again.
Linux on laptops has come a long way, much further I think than any other OS.