I was going to comment why not get them an iPad, but that would be a big change all at once. I like your approach of slowly introducing them to the new software they'd be running on Ubuntu on their Windows 10 system. That way they get used to all the new programs and the final switch to Ubuntu is pretty much a non-event. Smart! So smart that I don't think transitioning them to an iPad would be that easy.
iPads have decent keyboard cases now. I considered getting one to replace my laptop last month but decided against it because it's not really viable for coding yet.
Seems to be the simplest solution. I did this several years ago and my parents (almost) never have any issues. If your needs are simple (email + web) then an iPad will do it all without any of the downsides.
These days she doesn't buy a computer unless it will "run that minty thing".
I pretty much don't have any tech support calls from her anymore, I think a couple in 5 years and one of those was her knocking the video cable out with a hoover.
I just install Mint based on LTS and forget about it.
I did the same with my parents-in-law. The best thing with mint is it has very similar interface to windows (they were using windows XP previously). So I didn't need to explain anything, the icons just became green, chrome icon became blue and Firefox icon was the same. And nowadays they can even play some of my (even windows only) steam games like zuma or peggle deluxe. When I meet them I do an upgrade and that's it.
The best part is when they get that call from a scammer claiming that something is wrong with their windows installation and it dawns on them how obvious the scam is.
And even if they still think it's Windows by the time they get to the 'download this remote access client' stage they won't be able to run the exe and the scammer will probably give up on them.
Switched my father-in-law to ubuntu 10 years ago and I basically ended all his "support" calls to me :). He was constantly getting malware from all sorts of banners and popups while playing chess and rummy online. That, coupled with some good extensions such as mining block + uBlock + Disconnect changed the whole deal in an hour.
He's 76 now so yes, linux is a very good option for them.
I concur with this experience. A few years before my grandmother died, I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop for her. All she wanted to do was check her email, view her bank account and play solitaire. It was easy to set up shortcuts to any of this, and she never had any problems.
Every time I came to visit, I would make sure to check the status of the packages, and run the software updater if any updates were available.
The only 'problem' I experienced was confusion from my uncles, when they tried to use her laptop, when they came to visit. But I wouldn't really rate that a problem, since they just gave up and didn't ruin anything.
I set my dad up with Lubuntu just under a year ago and the only problem he's had is a system lockup that we traced to a malfunctioning mouse crashing the computer. We replaced the mouse a few weeks ago and haven't had the problem since. He's very happy with it.
The first thing they did on my absence was having a local PC store install XP again on it, because they couldn't use any of the software for their devices.
Nowadays they just use Windows and I am confident any local PC store will take care of their issues, instead of having me deal with them.
The article mentions that first you check how they use the computer, transition them to free software apps, after that transition to Linux. To check if their hardware works you can use a Live session, check the video, sound, network,printer.scanner etc
What exactly? Plugin an USB then opening Firefox on youtube and watching a video, then try to print something? Is this more work then reinstalling Windows, do all windows updates, reinstall all the apps, restore the data , each time something fishy starts happening and you are not sure if the computer was infected?
Installing Linux on your parents' computer and then having them give up and get support from a local store is less work for you than properly teaching them to use Linux before installing it on their computer and then providing support whenever they have issues.
It depends, if they only use a browser,solitaire,image viewer and video player then the Linux equivalent are very similar or better. If they use some exotic software then I agree with you.
But keep in mind that there are people that will have no idea that you changed the software, I was called by a neighbor to check why his laptop has no longer sound, somehow he muted Windows without knowing(maybe he hit some keyboard shortcut). With this low skilled people there is o retraining cost because their skill is already close to zero
If it's not always more work to retrain people with no tech skills than to not do it, will you retrain every such person in the country? You're already not doing it, so this won't increase your workload at all.
I am not a person that converts people to Linux, the entire thread was about when it is right to help a family member by installing Linux on their broken system, see above the conditions i think are the right one. The fact I could convert a random person to free software is not valuable enough to me to was 1 hour of my free time(yeah I am selfish).
That's my point. It takes an hour of time to convert someone to Linux. It takes 0 time to let them get their tech support from the local store. 1 hour is more than 0 work, even for a family member.
You also have to account for the fact that other people might think you're lazy or self centered because you don't want to spare some time to at least try to help them. Not saying that you're a bad person for refusing to provide free tech support, but your math is not entirely flawless.
Unless having a reputation for being lazy and selfless leads to more tech support calls, I think the math still works out on this being the least amount of work to get rid of tech support calls.
Whether this is a good idea or not is a separate question. Personally, I help my friends and family when I can.
For configuration you can help them with TeamView or something similar, usually parents don't go and buy printers or video cars without asking you if you are the one that is more technical.
But if you already ton't help them cleaning Windows and instead sending them to a store then sure let them continuing use Windows.
I am a Linux user and Free software supporter but I would never try to switch someone that is happy with his system, I am lazy and I hate taking responsibility for the system. (as an example a friend of mine fixed someone PC by reinstalling Windows but the sound would not work because of missing drivers (he did not had internet do find drivers) and he was suspecting of stealing the sound card or breaking the sound somehow... so yeah if you don't care send them to a store)
Exactly because I care to have a life outside work, and don't want them to have to depend on someone located 3000 km away, that I rather have them going to the local PC store.
Actually, yes my parents do buy stuff on their own, or by talking with friends of theirs, to whom Linux is that strange thing that some "university guys" use.
And to make it clear, it isn't a random PC store that does dirty tricks, just like many random car repair shops happen to do, rather something proper.
I experienced something similar. Set up ubuntu for my mom, even put in the hours to get all the funny videos/PowerPoints working. When I visited her again next time, a friend of hers had installed windows on the machine. Probably a pirated copy.
I provide very little tech support for my family since then. I'm no longer convinced that I really know what's best for them.
My nitpick is about some of the inconsistencies. You said that you got them accustomed to Firefox and LibreOffice, and then you turned around and installed Chrome and MS Office in Wine. Does that mean they didn't take well to the new apps, and your user training method wasn't entirely successful?
They use firefox as main browser, but for using DRM content I found Chrome to be the easier solution.
They worked their way to LibreOffice, but regarding spell- and grammar-checking LibreOffice really sucks. As my dad does professional writing it was just not enough.
I don't remember details but I also had major problems there, must have been two years ago, in the summer. Updating the needed plugins stopped working for some reason. Can't comment on current state as I haven't used Netflix on Linux for quite a while.
One thing to keep in mind about running Office on Wine (especially a version as old as 2007) is that the software has a number of known vulnerabilities, and the Wine installation breaks Microsoft's patching system(s). All patches have to be installed manually (unless there's a good script for this that I'm not aware of). Fortunately, most of the exploits will be designed to attack a Windows system, but it's still dangerous to leave it unpatched.
> It is not FOSS, but I did install google chrome as it was the easiest for watching netflix
I haven't had to do tech support for my parents on this, but I find that the best and easiest way to do streaming media is via a set-top box like Roku or Fire TV. The interface is simple and you'd probably rather be watching on your TV than your monitor anyway.
I switched my family to elementaryOS and Google docs. It was more than enough for their needs. I can't remember the last time anyone in my family used Windows or MacOS, and I don't think they miss either.
My father was willing to switch, my mother was not.
So: my father is now on his third Linux machine in 16 years (two laptops and now a NUC hiding behind a 24" monitor). Normal updates are handled automatically; I do a major upgrade once a year. rsnapshot backs up to an external disk three times a day. Every so often he tells me that he wants to do something new, and asks if it's possible; the answer is always yes.
My mother is on her fifth computer in that time. She's always unhappy with it, but refuses to change, because she's afraid that Linux will be incompatible with the new service-du-jour that her friends are always adopting.
That’s the biggest problem I see to Linux adoption in these scenarios. Unless it is something super geeky, nobody makes client softwares for desktop Linux.
From that perspective, the problem isn't so much the proliferation of service providers but rather the proliferation of aggressively proprietary protocols. By that I mean services that don't merely fail to document and stabilize their protocols, but actively attack and undermine third-party clients. Some of them outright ban third-party clients in their ToS, some theoretically allow third-party clients but impose API limits that are unusable at scale, and some deliberately make API/protocol changes to break clients created via reverse engineering. Anything short of that gets some kind of native Linux client if it gets popular.
That stance, in turn, is driven by business considerations that would probably be a huge tangent to discuss here. But it's important to keep in mind that this isn't just how things have always been; it's a relatively new trend, and trends can reverse.
What software? For the vast majority of people, a browser is enough. Hell, I'm computer literate, can code in many languages and am very comfortable with Linux, but 100% of what I need to do I can do from a browser.
Taxes, documents, spreadsheets, Netflix and other media, everything is accessible from a browser.
Similar situation here -- my mom uses Linux and my dad insists on Windows (to be fair, he has tried Linux here and there). My mom's computer has been trucking for over 10 years and after initial setup, she has rarely had issues. My dad has been through 4 different systems in the same amount of time and each one ends up riddled with malware and nigh unusable before he decides he just needs to upgrade again.
In my dad's case, major barriers to adoption are a) EVER rendering an MS Office document noticeably incorrectly, on either end; b) DRM'd video components like Comcast's Xfinity streaming services; c) a feeling that he doesn't really have control over it and can't just search for any software he wants and be able to use it, or can't Google a concern and find reasonably-basic instructions to get something to happen.
Those are all fairly legitimate concerns, I guess I'm just bothered by the way he treats all of these as direct failures of the OS rather than applying a little more flexibility -- if not to his computing habits in general, at least to his interpretation of the situation.
If switching OS creates those problems, it's entirely reasonable to blame the OS.
An attitude of "switch to Linux and if you can't do anything that you used to do then it's something else's fault" while possibly fair is exceptionally unhelpful.
s/anything you used to/a small handful of specific things/
I'm not trying to say that this is a solution to the problems entailed, and I'm not even saying that he should be obliged to go through the inconvenience of using a different OS if it doesn't fulfill all of his needs. There's just an air around the tone that's frustrating.
In general I would hope that performance, security, and system longevity would count for something, but I guess it's like telling someone to eat their vegetables. People are happier to just deal with a constant background malaise they can acclimate to and then ignore than they are to have the centralized in-the-moment friction of "to do thing X, switch to a separate VM/laptop/etc." And I mean, I get that.
So the conclusion is probably that Linux is not stable enough for a potential user until there is very little risk that that user's inertia will ever be broken. This works pretty much fine for my mom since she just needs basic word processing, a scanner, and a web browser. Not as much for my dad.
I always thought a good line for Canonical to get into would be to release a "Granny-buntu" distro that was super-locked down that grandkids could set up for their elders once and then ideally have a few easily identified launchers on the desktop that would launch with sensible defaults, and nothing else.
An unprivileged account can still do stuff like accidentally hide the toolbar or delete some shortcut to an application. The machine still boots, but it's effectively unusable.
I switched my mother to Linux years ago and it was much better for her than Windows. These days, though, Chromebooks are even better since they are essentially Linux and much more foolproof than a general purpose Linux distro.
Would love to switch myself but with a 4k XPS had all kinds of scaling issues and gave up which was a shame. Considering typical Linux user probably has cutting edge hardware was surprised how poorly 4k was handled.
I have sent my father (who I no longer interact with) and my mother, a laptop with ubuntu installed. I have not had to support that thing for 5 years. it just runs. no updates, no virus scan ads. Its been amazing. i installed VLC player and firefox. They are living the life being "connected"
No updates at all. Its not my problem and I have expressed the dangers. Family situation prevents this kind of support and they wont stop using it. No issues at all. My fiance's aunt on the other hand (using windows) has had to call me frequently for virus/slow down/connecting printers etc.Its been a pain.
> Show them the app store and tell them, whatever they install from there is safe (so no viruses or something)
Is this generally true for Ubuntu? I'm not terribly familiar with it, but i was under the impression that vetting apps is a difficult problem in general.
I did the same thing a while back, except that I used Fedora because everything in Ubuntu crashed constantly on their old hardware and half the drivers wouldn't work. When their old Dell finally died, they decided to get a new one and asked me which they should get. I pointed them at the previous gen XPS (that still had USB-A ports) and they bought one with Ubuntu on it out of the box without asking questions and don't appear to know the difference (they did ask me if I could change the trash icon back to the old one, because they didn't like how "blue" the new one was… but that was a minor change compared to my dads work machine being upgraded to Windows 10 so I think they're okay with it for now).
So far they seem happy with it; hopefully more laptops ship with Ubuntu or similar in the future.
I'm curious how it actually saved you headache and support calls? Your general process of switching them over was well thought out, but I can't see how this really helps either of you.
In my experience Linux requires a lot more command-line tweaking and such to get basic things working, but then again that could be for my more advanced use cases.
So the only benefit I can see is that it is more privacy focused and safer than Windows, but at the cost of a limited application selection (through the Ubuntu App Store at least).
I have no clue why, but Linux (with the current Ubuntu) setup crashed a lot less than Win 10.
As I mention in the blog post, sure it is not suitable for every situation. So if you have an advanced use case, you need to do more tweaking. (I do this with my own system as well)
But for my parents use case it worked out of the box. And installing a new printer did work flawless because of CUPS :D
>In my experience Linux requires a lot more command-line tweaking and such to get basic things working
I don't think that true if you just need a browser, email and an office suite. One key element could be hardware, I still feel like desktops are a better choice than a laptop, in terms of getting everything working correctly.
There are tons of people using linux distros who don't even know command line exists. One time I was helping my friend to do something. She studies design and is basically computer illiterate. Somehow she was using Ubuntu, not sure how that happened but she claimed to be very happy. Anyway, the problem was super simple, but as an i3 archlinux user I literally never use GUI so I fired a command line and solved it in one line. She was perplexed and wasn't really sure what just happened. She didn't even know what command line is. Anyway, to be more helpful, I also managed to solve the problem by clicking buttons...
I run Ubuntu on three machines and never in a million years would I set it up for my parents. I still struggle with lots of little gotchas and annoying issues like sometimes it just doesn't want to suspend. Or sometimes after resuming, the keyboard doesn't work so gotta unplug it and plug it back in. Sometimes my wifi just conks out for no apparent reason. On and on, just lots of little paper cuts.
I switched my parents over to OSX years ago and have had to do almost no tech support at all. I really like Linux, but I still would argue that the OS that "just works" the most is still OSX.
Even Ubuntu is fine (this is coming from Fedora fan). If you are going for the long haul, do the following:
- use LTS. You don't need every 6-mo release.
- don't install packages from random ppas, if you don't know what they are doing to your system. Of course, do not install anything not managed by repositories, that would break your system (If I had a dime for every person that installed hplip/nvidia driver/etc from HP/Nvidia/etc site and just overwritten their apt-managed system files. It worked... until upgrade).
My parents also use Ubuntu; they are using it since 6.06, on the current hardware since 12.04. Upgrading them between LTS releases is non-event, aside the UI changes.
I always found Ubuntu to be easiest to use. No fighting to get GPU drivers to work, or other weird issues. Easy to install things when I was first learning too.
Edit: I meant to ask what people are using that's more stable. Fedora you need to reinstall every few months, Debian has some 'rules to not break Debian' that seem to make it special purpose, centos hates my GPU, trisquel gets very rare updates. I know that all of this is solvable, but Ubuntu seems simpler to set and forget.
Gnome is buggy though. I love it but I sure wish it ran better
The problem you describe is mostly because of hardware. And you didn't switch to OSX, you switched them to Apple hardware with Apple software, not an OS switch.
On well supported hardware for Linux I have my parents since many years on Fedora. I even just swapped the drive from an old Lenovo netbook to a newer Fujitsu laptop without any issues in between
In my experience the same hardware when ran under Windows does not have these issues.
EDIT: also just want to say I'm not anti-Linux, I'm just being realistic. I understand Linux's history and how it has some disadvantages (and advantages). I'm just saying at the end of the day, my interest is a reliable machine, regardless of how I get there.
This is usually true until there’s a big Windows version upgrade (7 to 10, for example), and the manufacturer and/or the component OEMs decide to stop supporting their stuff with drivers.
It really depends. Hardware with support in kernel does work really well. I have less issue with my AMD graphic card on Linux than I had in Windows (random blue screen, gpu resets, a random driver version that will just not work). Granted, the quality really improved past years.
My work laptop is also much more stable. On windows 10, the intel driver will always blue screen when i had no more ram left. I never had one crash on Fedora.
It does require to look at hardware support first, but that's the same way than checking hardware quality before buying. I always buy things that meet my requirements, on computer hardware, one is Linux support, I don't see this as an issue.
Of course, since that hardware is tested under Windows.
OPs point is that if you're comparing Linux to macOS, you need to also compare the hardware accordingly - just as you buy a Mac to run macOS on, you need to buy hardware that's guaranteed to work well with Linux. And such Linux hardware is still going to cost less than a MacBook or a Mac Mini.
I bought an Asus 1215B, sold with Ubuntu, a couple of years ago.
WiFi working has always been ups and downs, specially bad at the beggining when Canonical decided to exchange the closed source driver by an open source one, even thought it wasn't feature complete. I had to spend 3 months using LAN cable until the drive was actually working.
The Radeon on the Brazos APU is a DirectX 11 class GPU, but after AMD dropped fxglr, I lost video hardware acceleration, and the OpenGL feature level has been droped to a lower version.
So much for buying a laptop with Linux support out of the box.
Try running OSX on the same hardware and see how well it works of if you encounter problems too.
I experienced some standby/resume issues a few times along my years with linux, sometimes the fix was simply to upgrade/downgrade the kernel, sometimes using a different distro did the trick, sometimes it was a matter of configuring things correctly and sadly sometimes the hardware manufacturer was hostile to linux.
Try running macos on PC hardware and you'll feel the true pain of incompatibility. Buy hardware supported by your OS of choice. You dont buy an arm computer and expect to run windows. You shouldn't buy a PC for Windows and expect it to function perfectly for Linux.
That's not the point, though. The competitor (Windows) mostly has none of these problems, and that's pretty much what matters EOD.
If you cannot expect a generic PC to run Linux, `$currentYear is the year of the Linux Desktop` will continue to be little more than hyperbole. That's a big problem if we're looking for widespread adoption.
>The competitor (Windows) mostly has none of these problems,
Windows tends to self destruct via forced updates over time. So far I have not had a single windows installation that didn't require a reinstall after a certain amount of time has passed. The type of failure is different but it's significantly worse.
This is coming from someone who uses Arch Linux, a bleeding edge distro that isn't known for it's stability (well it's pretty stable so far).
The only reason this isn't the case in Linux/MacOS most likely is simply due to the lack of crapware targeting these platforms though (because the reward profile significantly favors targeting Windows more).
You can see this in action with Android vs iOS too (no flamewar here folks). Android tends to get bogged down quite easily if active maintenance isn't done due to the proliferation of nefarious background workers.
Sure, but that hardware advantage is something Apple should be able to take advantage of, they worked hard to get it. And I take advantage of it as well. At the end of the day, I just care about my needing to do support and that a computer generally works.
I run Ubuntu on a 2015 and 2017 Lenovo ThinkPad (T450 and T470s) and a desktop I built myself. Interestingly it runs the best on my custom desktop.
I use Ubuntu due to i3. The advantages a solid tiling window manager give me outweigh the drawbacks. But if OSX had a tiling window manager on par with i3 I'd drop Ubuntu in a heartbeat.
EDIT: and just to add, when I run Windows on these machines I don't have any of these problems: suspend works, USB and wifi work, etc. In my experience Windows's main problem is that it still crashes pretty regularly.
That's totally fair. It's on my todo list to try some other distros. I will probably try Debian first. I chose Ubuntu due to it being so popular and also because my company's IT supports it. But if other distros are more reliable then that's fantastic.
Mint on my Lenovo P51 has been brilliant. There were basically zero issues to get everything working like sound, sleep/resume and network (common sticky spots). Being a ThinkPad, there were also some utilities to do more specific things like power management to only charge to 80%; mine's usually plugged in, this is supposed to help battery life.
I can still dual-boot to the Win10 it came with, but it's been a month or two between typically.
Thinkpads are not really problem. Yes, Lenovo occasionally does something with ACPI in their brand new models, that breaks Linux, but overall they are fine. Of course, it is possible to configure them in such a way, that will be problematic; for example, if you put Nvidia GPU in your config.
I think the point is that if you buy Apple hardware, of course macOS is going to run well, because you bought hardware specific to that, so do the same for Linux, buy Linux specific/well tested hardware instead of just any old crap, because you weouldn't do the same with macOS.
My mom's NUC has never caused any trouble running the latest Ubuntu. Network printer, scanner, wireless mouse, webcam, bluetooth headphones, USB hard drives, sleep/hibernation... not a single problem.
It very much depends on what hardware you’re trying to run Linux on. I’ve never had a issue with most of my laptops (which have mostly been Samsung and ASUS machines) but ironically the one laptop that’s been the biggest pain point is my 2018 model MacBook Pro. I get why the Mac doesn’t play nicely with Linux and don’t blame the Mac for that per se but honestly even the stuff that does work correctly (USB-C, keyboard, etc) are still horrible to use so I definitely wouldn’t have been happy even if I’d left OSX in there. In fact I’d probably say getting a Mac was one of my stupidest career decisions of recent years.
But anyhow, back on topic, it really depends on your hardware.
Well Ubuntu is a broken by design bleeding edge attempt to be microsoft with linux so it is not something I would use myself (ditched it 15 years ago) and even less install for people who are not computer literate with time on their hands.
I have two main issues with OSX: it only works on overpriced hardware with no repairability and some things are hidden or very difficult to find when possible (sort of the civilized version of GNOME's way of removing settings and features and thinking the user is dumb).
If "just works" is the relevant metric, it's hard to beat Debian stable - or CentOS, or perhaps OpenSUSE Leap. Sure, the things you might be able to easily achieve with them are quite limited. But the flip side is that they will chug along nicely and reliably for years upon years, with nary a hiccup aside from the occasional security update. That's the sort of "just works" that we - and our non-technical acquaintances - are most in need of!
Yep. My parents can usually also find some kind of support system with a Mac, either on Google or if they must, at an Apple Store.
I would never in a million years subject my parents to Linux on the desktop unless there is some kind of support system that is not entirely dependent on me.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It's been pretty much down hill since then. Had multiple cases where the client works, and the web links don't. Or the weblinks work and the client doesn't. Sometimes calls work... but not receiving invites... or vice versa.
All the users I knew that used skype regularly have fled.
The only people I know that uses Skype are people working for large companies and they only use it because their employers tell them to.
I think it has to do with how your countries telcos developed. If phone calls a cheap, why would you care about Skype? WhatsApp, Telegram and other messaging services seem to be popular around the world, but, perhaps because SMS quickly became basically free here, everyone just use that.
Can't see why they changed in the first place and the article doesn't explain what and why the wasted time occurred.
With Windows you can have Live-based logins and out of band password resets as well as stateless sandboxed containers. If they save everything to One Drive there's nothing to change or backup on the OS.
I am a heavy Linux user, by the way. Yeah, it sucks less than before but for daily use by regular users Windows is still hard to beat, especially for general productivity apps.
Back in 2008 or so, my relatives did the really nice thing of buying my Grandma the cheapest possible Walmart computer they could find. You know the sort of Windows eMachine that comes preinstalled with spyware?
Of course, my relatives live about 6 hours away from her and all of the "on site support" fell to me. In the first 2 years of my Grandma getting this computer I must have gone over more than 10 times to fix all sorts of stupid issues that were pretty much inherent to the machine.
I grew sick of this and one day I went over, backed up the few important files on the machine and installed linux mint. That was in 2010, it is now 2019 and I have gone over to fix my Grandmas computer twice since. Once to help her set up a printer, and another time when she accidentally cleared her cookies and couldn't figure out how to log back into anything.
The strange thing is that my Grandma never commented on the Mint interface and as far as I can tell she never noticed that I completely changed the operating system ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So my personal anecdote also involves mint - I've set one up for someone years ago(probably around 2013-2014) and you're right, it had no issues. However, when I came over to visit last year I wanted to do some maintenance, so "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" would be the start. Nope, turns out that the update servers for that version of Mint have been switched off long time ago and none of the links resolve anymore. Upgrading the apt server list just resulted in hundreds of errors when actually trying to upgrade the system. At this point I stopped, worried that I'm just going to break everything.
After that, I had a realization - yes, the system ran for 4 years without any maintenance, but it also received no updates and no patches whatsoever during that time, because linux does not do that by default(or at least Mint didn't). And then the only issues my windows-using family have is 90% of the time due to....windows updates. Things are not where they used to be, some application changed so it's now different, they had something open and the computer restarted itself....the usual. And while that is a problem....at least their machines are always patched and up to date. That Mint installation was running in the same state that it was in the day I set it up, and after just few years it couldn't even be updated any more(to my best effort). That's pretty bad too.
This was what turned me off from Linux Mint for my own use. The catch-22 of you need to upgrade to a supported version, but the servers / packages you would need in order to do the upgrade were turned off in the meantime. To be fair, Linux Mint states that a complete reinstall is the recommended way, but since I do development, it's a pain to have to locate and reinstall from scratch all the packages I need.
Also I think Ubuntu suffers the same problem, if you wait long enough. I'm pretty sure I have an Ubuntu install that I waited too long to upgrade.
It is enough to make me serious consider switching to FreeBSD, except I don't think the 3D (game engine) library I want to use is supported.
If she's like mine she's going to tell you everything is fine and when you visit her in a few months you'll see it isn't working.
I once helped my grandma, on the phone, navigate through a VCR to record a star trek episode. Everything was going well but I came home to an empty VHS.
"I told you it was fine so you wouldn't worry."
I miss my grandma more than that episode of star trek.
This isn't a great example (or maybe it is considering how non-trivial the operation is), but running stuff from the command line can often be great for tech support. There is a reason support normally asks people to open things from the run dialog instead of asking them to go through the start menu.
This might be a bit too much to expect grandma to perfectly type, but "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" to update her system is certainly easier then trying to describe what to click on a graphical UI.
Talk your grandmother through anything GUI related over the phone and compare. Spend half an hour trying to help her figure out which button she should press only to find out at step 3 she opened facebook instead of the start menu, and that she actually has been pressing buttons randomly for 15 minutes while producing assorted nonspecific vocalizations of agreement while doing literally none of the things you've asked.
Or even get the legendary confusion of them never having turned the machine on in the first place.
Generally, after years of experience doing exactly this, I've found it is a lot easier to dictate a literal sequence of characters over the phone than coordinate a complex visual action with only confused verbal feedback.
Of course, with terminal stuff, you have even further options in, say, sending an email with an attached bash file for them to download and click, or if this continues, set up a script for them (and ad an icon for it in their start menu) that ssh's them into a handy aws or digital ocean instance so you can then ssh into their machine from the comfort of your own home and do it yourself.
It gets worse when dependencies have changed and now you've installed a library that's incompatible with the dependencies of an app you need and everything grinds to a halt.
Yeah, I've found that enough things change between installs that it's really tough to automate the process. Instead I keep a document that lists all the steps I need to set up my dev machine from scratch (with a data backup), and each time I go through the process I update the document. That makes it much less taxing than trying to figure out and remember everything without a guide, but is flexible enough to handle the inevitable differences from one time to the next.
If you're provisioning machines on a regular basis it's a different story, but if it's your own personal machine that you're reinstalling maybe every couple years this seems like the most straightforward approach.
Also: Use LVM and snapshot before updating to save yourself a lot of headaches.
I went one step farther and built an Ansible role for my workstation and try to install everything via that role. I don’t always, but it sure makes reloads and new machines easier to deal with. I have since split it into a couple roles for full desktop vs somewhere I just ssh into but have enough access to install things to suit me.
I actually remember running into this issue a lot when building Docker images. Generally you want your docker image to be reproducible so you'd want to lock versions of your dependencies. But when doing this with apt-get install, a lot of the time I find that when a new version of a package is released, the old one gets removed and becomes no longer accessible, so locking versions actually ends up resulting in _more_ build flakiness than just using the latest of whatever package available at build-time, which is obviously not ideal.
Deleting older versions of packages that people may still be relying on seems like a very obvious no-go in a dependency management system. Any idea why this happens regardless? Is it just a matter of costs? Or is there more nuance to it that I'm missing?
The entire software industry has shifted to a stance of not caring when updates break user workflow, experience, functionality and habits. For basically any modern piece of software, whether/when to take each update, rather than being a no-brainer, is a very difficult decision: it is impossible for the end user to separate security/functionality fixes from workflow/functionality-breaking behaviour changes. Everything, across the board, universally, suffers from this: web browsers (few plugins survive browser updates), office software (ui rearranged every time), operating systems (packages and entire applications just vanish)...
Visible behaviour and functionality is changed or removed without user involvement, choice or recourse, turning every update into a game of Russian Roulette. Even LTS builds don't mean no breakage of behaviours users rely on.
From the developer's POV maintaining security/bugfix-only forks of every feature branch rapidly becomes intractable as a project gains complexity / matures. Meanwhile, for startups, "move fast and break things" is the creed. So as we demand more from our software overall, this situation can only get worse, not better.
The temptation for modern users to say "you know what? it's MY bloody computer, not yours; my problems are actually more important to me than whatever you think you're solving" and unplug from the update streams is overwhelming.
Yep. I think I'll literally stop taking Android upgrades because of this. Just few years ago I'd get really excited every time new version of firmware was released for my phone, but now I loathe it - every single damn time the interface changes and you can't do anything about it. Like now I have taken the upgrade to Android Pie for my OnePlus 5T, and....the clock moved to the left now. Ok, google for a solution - nope, can't move it back to the right. Someone somewhere decided that this is "better" so the customer has to accept it. Like you said, I'm getting really fed up with this - is it my phone, or not????
But when doing this with apt-get install, a lot of the time I find that when a new version of a package is released, the old one gets removed and becomes no longer accessible, so locking versions actually ends up resulting in _more_ build flakiness than just using the latest of whatever package available at build-time, which is obviously not ideal.
I would maintain a local apt repository for that situation.
When package names change, or don't exist any more, it requires human intervention even when the rest of the update process is automatic. This is the difference between `apt-get upgrade` and `apt-get dist-upgrade`. All you're really doing by putting off the update in that case is compressing all the little bits of human intervention you'd have been doing during every update, into one big push.
Arch Linux is based on a rolling update, so my understanding is that you shouldn't have to jump to FreeBSD (nice as it is in some ways) to avoid a release-based upgrade.
I've only been using it for a little while on a couple systems, but seems nice enough. (Mint or regular Debian for years otherwise.)
I ditched ubuntu in the deepest hole I could find because every 6 months was a nightmare, and I replaced it with linux mint which seemed to actually work.
Then I had to deal with such system upgrade and this was a real pain, so instead I replaced linux mint with linux mint debian edition and things went well for a while.
Then came the system upgrade time again, it was not as painful as with regular mint but it was still a pain to manage.
My grandma managed to deal with her everyday use of the computer but there is no way she could manage the mint system upgrade part by herself. So the computer lived for a while with only the non system upgrade until I switched her to manjaro which allows her to have a roling release and deal with system upgrades herself.
This right here is why I switched to Debian. Got tired of downstream forks breaking the upgrade process, which hasn't been an issue since switching a few years back.
The Gnome software center makes it easy to find and install apps too, reminds me of click n run from Linspire.
It's not very often you see Click-N-Run mentioned. Early versions had an easter egg if you queued apps to install whose first letters spelled ClicknRun, then pressed Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C.
CNR was years ahead of any of these app stores, really wish it had continued on rather than others having to build APT clients that still don't work quite as well.
Careful with Manjaro you are close to bleeding edge packages, and updates may break things. Not Manjaro but on Arch I lost bluetooth after an update last week - I had to downgrade packages for a day to fix it. You don't want this to happen to normal users.
You might have had that problem in 2013, since Mint editions were based on the latest Ubuntu release. But since May 2014, all releases of Mint are based instead on Ubuntu LTS release. This means they get support for five years, rather than 9 months. For example Mint 17 (May 2014) has support and updates that will only cease this April. The latest release, 19.1, is supported for 10 years, until 2028.
That's pretty much true of everything Linux related. It has or will get better. The state of WiFi on Linux around 2009 was horrid. It would break with every update. It got better.
I've been using Linux for almost 2 decades and I've abandoned numerous projects over the years because the community was so unhelpful. The most recent was an Asterisk box for a home VoIP server back around 2012, before that it was a MythTV box in 2008.
The main problem is that until it gets better it ends up alienating a lot of people because the standard support from the community is "did you RTFM?"
I've just returned from a philosophical café about algorithms and society. A 78 year old attendee in the audience was advocating Linux to avoid junk on your computer. He claimed it's easy for anyone to switch from Windows to Linux as he had done last year. He installed Linux Mint himself, which he claimed is easy because it's just a download and he's not a technical person himself.
What is a "philosophical Cafe"? Sounds awesome.
Edit: Google sends me to https://www.cafesphilo.org/ which sounds great but seems to be mainly limited to France.
You found the right thing. It's mostly French and exclusively European. They're places to discuss ideas and theories respectfully and civilly. I don't think the same thing exists in America in any form.
The topics can vary from "the nature of choice" to something like what GP posted.
Something tells me a 78 year old attending a Philosophy meetup about Algorithms and Society is probably a hell of a lot smarter than your average 78 year old.
I'd love to conduct a study on the perception of computers. It seems that many people from the previous generation (born before 80s) are floating in a sea of confusion and ad-hoc reflexes. Changing an OS does barely affect the noise/signal ratio to them.
So how do you take care of updates and upgrades? There should have been at least 3 major dist upgrades required to keep her on security support since then and afaik back then Linux Mint offically didn't support major upgrades and suggested to do a clean install instead, which is defnintely not something I'd let my grandma do on her own.
> The strange thing is that my Grandma never commented on the Mint interface and as far as I can tell she never noticed that I completely changed the operating system
Same, except for my 70 year old parents. I switched them from Windows to Ubuntu MATE. All I had to do was simply rename the Firefox icon to "Internet" and they were good to go.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 492 ms ] threadI’m not an Apple fanboy by any means, but the reality is that a lot of people don’t need a PC or Laptop of any sort, they just need an iPad!
save/saver instead of safe/safer.
These days she doesn't buy a computer unless it will "run that minty thing".
I pretty much don't have any tech support calls from her anymore, I think a couple in 5 years and one of those was her knocking the video cable out with a hoover.
I just install Mint based on LTS and forget about it.
And an easier solution, don't install WINE!
He's 76 now so yes, linux is a very good option for them.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Every time I came to visit, I would make sure to check the status of the packages, and run the software updater if any updates were available.
The only 'problem' I experienced was confusion from my uncles, when they tried to use her laptop, when they came to visit. But I wouldn't really rate that a problem, since they just gave up and didn't ruin anything.
The first thing they did on my absence was having a local PC store install XP again on it, because they couldn't use any of the software for their devices.
Nowadays they just use Windows and I am confident any local PC store will take care of their issues, instead of having me deal with them.
1 you were already wasting your time when visiting the parents on fixing the computer
2 the parents were transitioned to the Linux cmpatible applications like Firefox,Chrome, VLC,
3 all the parents workflows were accounted for and were met by Linux
4 the switch is done to Ubuntu LTS and not some exotic distribution
5 training is done on how to accomplish the new workflows
If the conditions above do not apply then you should not attempt this, send them to a repair shop to format and reinstall their OS.
For some workflows that most parents do Linux is good enough, my parents only use the browser,FB and YT apps(on a tablet).
But keep in mind that there are people that will have no idea that you changed the software, I was called by a neighbor to check why his laptop has no longer sound, somehow he muted Windows without knowing(maybe he hit some keyboard shortcut). With this low skilled people there is o retraining cost because their skill is already close to zero
Whether this is a good idea or not is a separate question. Personally, I help my friends and family when I can.
Additionally any dude at the local PC store can help with configuration issues during warranty.
Or when their network goes tits up and the calldesk from the network provider only has support scripts for Windows or macOS.
But if you already ton't help them cleaning Windows and instead sending them to a store then sure let them continuing use Windows.
I am a Linux user and Free software supporter but I would never try to switch someone that is happy with his system, I am lazy and I hate taking responsibility for the system. (as an example a friend of mine fixed someone PC by reinstalling Windows but the sound would not work because of missing drivers (he did not had internet do find drivers) and he was suspecting of stealing the sound card or breaking the sound somehow... so yeah if you don't care send them to a store)
Actually, yes my parents do buy stuff on their own, or by talking with friends of theirs, to whom Linux is that strange thing that some "university guys" use.
And to make it clear, it isn't a random PC store that does dirty tricks, just like many random car repair shops happen to do, rather something proper.
I provide very little tech support for my family since then. I'm no longer convinced that I really know what's best for them.
Chrome for Netflix and Spotify only, and Office 2007 because it's better than LibreOffice for their parents.
They worked their way to LibreOffice, but regarding spell- and grammar-checking LibreOffice really sucks. As my dad does professional writing it was just not enough.
I haven't had to do tech support for my parents on this, but I find that the best and easiest way to do streaming media is via a set-top box like Roku or Fire TV. The interface is simple and you'd probably rather be watching on your TV than your monitor anyway.
1) Sit down with your folks and talk trough their daily usage of their computer (Please be not so arrogant to think you already know it all)
As technologists this all comes easy to us and it is easy to forget what everyday computer usage means.
So: my father is now on his third Linux machine in 16 years (two laptops and now a NUC hiding behind a 24" monitor). Normal updates are handled automatically; I do a major upgrade once a year. rsnapshot backs up to an external disk three times a day. Every so often he tells me that he wants to do something new, and asks if it's possible; the answer is always yes.
My mother is on her fifth computer in that time. She's always unhappy with it, but refuses to change, because she's afraid that Linux will be incompatible with the new service-du-jour that her friends are always adopting.
That stance, in turn, is driven by business considerations that would probably be a huge tangent to discuss here. But it's important to keep in mind that this isn't just how things have always been; it's a relatively new trend, and trends can reverse.
Taxes, documents, spreadsheets, Netflix and other media, everything is accessible from a browser.
In my dad's case, major barriers to adoption are a) EVER rendering an MS Office document noticeably incorrectly, on either end; b) DRM'd video components like Comcast's Xfinity streaming services; c) a feeling that he doesn't really have control over it and can't just search for any software he wants and be able to use it, or can't Google a concern and find reasonably-basic instructions to get something to happen.
Those are all fairly legitimate concerns, I guess I'm just bothered by the way he treats all of these as direct failures of the OS rather than applying a little more flexibility -- if not to his computing habits in general, at least to his interpretation of the situation.
An attitude of "switch to Linux and if you can't do anything that you used to do then it's something else's fault" while possibly fair is exceptionally unhelpful.
I'm not trying to say that this is a solution to the problems entailed, and I'm not even saying that he should be obliged to go through the inconvenience of using a different OS if it doesn't fulfill all of his needs. There's just an air around the tone that's frustrating.
In general I would hope that performance, security, and system longevity would count for something, but I guess it's like telling someone to eat their vegetables. People are happier to just deal with a constant background malaise they can acclimate to and then ignore than they are to have the centralized in-the-moment friction of "to do thing X, switch to a separate VM/laptop/etc." And I mean, I get that.
So the conclusion is probably that Linux is not stable enough for a potential user until there is very little risk that that user's inertia will ever be broken. This works pretty much fine for my mom since she just needs basic word processing, a scanner, and a web browser. Not as much for my dad.
1 - https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg-import
https://github.com/borgbackup/borgweb
https://github.com/borgbase/vorta
With that setup is not so easy to nuke things over. (But a backup is still important :D)
Usually slightly better with compatibility as most developers target Chrome first and has Flash support for even the oldest of sites.
Linux itself is oblivious to 4k, that's a job for drivers and DEs. Before you gave up, did you try switching DEs or looking for better drivers?
GNOME, for example, supports HiDPI and (experimental) fractional scaling. [0]
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI#GNOME
Is this generally true for Ubuntu? I'm not terribly familiar with it, but i was under the impression that vetting apps is a difficult problem in general.
So far they seem happy with it; hopefully more laptops ship with Ubuntu or similar in the future.
In my experience Linux requires a lot more command-line tweaking and such to get basic things working, but then again that could be for my more advanced use cases.
So the only benefit I can see is that it is more privacy focused and safer than Windows, but at the cost of a limited application selection (through the Ubuntu App Store at least).
As I mention in the blog post, sure it is not suitable for every situation. So if you have an advanced use case, you need to do more tweaking. (I do this with my own system as well)
But for my parents use case it worked out of the box. And installing a new printer did work flawless because of CUPS :D
I don't think that true if you just need a browser, email and an office suite. One key element could be hardware, I still feel like desktops are a better choice than a laptop, in terms of getting everything working correctly.
I switched my parents over to OSX years ago and have had to do almost no tech support at all. I really like Linux, but I still would argue that the OS that "just works" the most is still OSX.
- use LTS. You don't need every 6-mo release.
- don't install packages from random ppas, if you don't know what they are doing to your system. Of course, do not install anything not managed by repositories, that would break your system (If I had a dime for every person that installed hplip/nvidia driver/etc from HP/Nvidia/etc site and just overwritten their apt-managed system files. It worked... until upgrade).
My parents also use Ubuntu; they are using it since 6.06, on the current hardware since 12.04. Upgrading them between LTS releases is non-event, aside the UI changes.
Edit: I meant to ask what people are using that's more stable. Fedora you need to reinstall every few months, Debian has some 'rules to not break Debian' that seem to make it special purpose, centos hates my GPU, trisquel gets very rare updates. I know that all of this is solvable, but Ubuntu seems simpler to set and forget.
Gnome is buggy though. I love it but I sure wish it ran better
On well supported hardware for Linux I have my parents since many years on Fedora. I even just swapped the drive from an old Lenovo netbook to a newer Fujitsu laptop without any issues in between
Which does not change the fact that they are still problems - no matter how unfair it is and how little the Linux-Community is to blame for it.
I used Linux on many different machines - and sadly I can confirm lots of problems with hardware. Standby/Resume, etc.
EDIT: also just want to say I'm not anti-Linux, I'm just being realistic. I understand Linux's history and how it has some disadvantages (and advantages). I'm just saying at the end of the day, my interest is a reliable machine, regardless of how I get there.
My work laptop is also much more stable. On windows 10, the intel driver will always blue screen when i had no more ram left. I never had one crash on Fedora.
It does require to look at hardware support first, but that's the same way than checking hardware quality before buying. I always buy things that meet my requirements, on computer hardware, one is Linux support, I don't see this as an issue.
OPs point is that if you're comparing Linux to macOS, you need to also compare the hardware accordingly - just as you buy a Mac to run macOS on, you need to buy hardware that's guaranteed to work well with Linux. And such Linux hardware is still going to cost less than a MacBook or a Mac Mini.
WiFi working has always been ups and downs, specially bad at the beggining when Canonical decided to exchange the closed source driver by an open source one, even thought it wasn't feature complete. I had to spend 3 months using LAN cable until the drive was actually working.
The Radeon on the Brazos APU is a DirectX 11 class GPU, but after AMD dropped fxglr, I lost video hardware acceleration, and the OpenGL feature level has been droped to a lower version.
So much for buying a laptop with Linux support out of the box.
I experienced some standby/resume issues a few times along my years with linux, sometimes the fix was simply to upgrade/downgrade the kernel, sometimes using a different distro did the trick, sometimes it was a matter of configuring things correctly and sadly sometimes the hardware manufacturer was hostile to linux.
If you cannot expect a generic PC to run Linux, `$currentYear is the year of the Linux Desktop` will continue to be little more than hyperbole. That's a big problem if we're looking for widespread adoption.
But the story ends with OS X.
Windows tends to self destruct via forced updates over time. So far I have not had a single windows installation that didn't require a reinstall after a certain amount of time has passed. The type of failure is different but it's significantly worse.
This is coming from someone who uses Arch Linux, a bleeding edge distro that isn't known for it's stability (well it's pretty stable so far).
The only reason this isn't the case in Linux/MacOS most likely is simply due to the lack of crapware targeting these platforms though (because the reward profile significantly favors targeting Windows more).
You can see this in action with Android vs iOS too (no flamewar here folks). Android tends to get bogged down quite easily if active maintenance isn't done due to the proliferation of nefarious background workers.
As far as I understand, non-standard or non-x86 aren't really mainstream. Windows for ARM-like devices is nowhere close to being ready for prime time.
I run Ubuntu on a 2015 and 2017 Lenovo ThinkPad (T450 and T470s) and a desktop I built myself. Interestingly it runs the best on my custom desktop.
I use Ubuntu due to i3. The advantages a solid tiling window manager give me outweigh the drawbacks. But if OSX had a tiling window manager on par with i3 I'd drop Ubuntu in a heartbeat.
EDIT: and just to add, when I run Windows on these machines I don't have any of these problems: suspend works, USB and wifi work, etc. In my experience Windows's main problem is that it still crashes pretty regularly.
ubuntu is notoriously buggy and lenovo thinkpads are more and more hostile to linux since 5-6 years.
Try something like manjaro instead of ubuntu and see if you still experience the same issues.
I can still dual-boot to the Win10 it came with, but it's been a month or two between typically.
It's Ideapads that have often the problems.
No, that would be a software problem; as in driver-related. And as others noted, it's still a problem either way.
Actually the Gigabyte Brix variant because I didn't want to buy the WiFi/bluetooth card separately. But it's the exact same mainboard.
ChromiumOS is perfect for it. It's distributed by Neverware as CloudReady OS.
But anyhow, back on topic, it really depends on your hardware.
I have two main issues with OSX: it only works on overpriced hardware with no repairability and some things are hidden or very difficult to find when possible (sort of the civilized version of GNOME's way of removing settings and features and thinking the user is dumb).
I would never in a million years subject my parents to Linux on the desktop unless there is some kind of support system that is not entirely dependent on me.
I guess, we live in different realities.
All the users I knew that used skype regularly have fled.
I think it has to do with how your countries telcos developed. If phone calls a cheap, why would you care about Skype? WhatsApp, Telegram and other messaging services seem to be popular around the world, but, perhaps because SMS quickly became basically free here, everyone just use that.
With Windows you can have Live-based logins and out of band password resets as well as stateless sandboxed containers. If they save everything to One Drive there's nothing to change or backup on the OS.
I am a heavy Linux user, by the way. Yeah, it sucks less than before but for daily use by regular users Windows is still hard to beat, especially for general productivity apps.
Back in 2008 or so, my relatives did the really nice thing of buying my Grandma the cheapest possible Walmart computer they could find. You know the sort of Windows eMachine that comes preinstalled with spyware?
Of course, my relatives live about 6 hours away from her and all of the "on site support" fell to me. In the first 2 years of my Grandma getting this computer I must have gone over more than 10 times to fix all sorts of stupid issues that were pretty much inherent to the machine.
I grew sick of this and one day I went over, backed up the few important files on the machine and installed linux mint. That was in 2010, it is now 2019 and I have gone over to fix my Grandmas computer twice since. Once to help her set up a printer, and another time when she accidentally cleared her cookies and couldn't figure out how to log back into anything.
The strange thing is that my Grandma never commented on the Mint interface and as far as I can tell she never noticed that I completely changed the operating system ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After that, I had a realization - yes, the system ran for 4 years without any maintenance, but it also received no updates and no patches whatsoever during that time, because linux does not do that by default(or at least Mint didn't). And then the only issues my windows-using family have is 90% of the time due to....windows updates. Things are not where they used to be, some application changed so it's now different, they had something open and the computer restarted itself....the usual. And while that is a problem....at least their machines are always patched and up to date. That Mint installation was running in the same state that it was in the day I set it up, and after just few years it couldn't even be updated any more(to my best effort). That's pretty bad too.
Also I think Ubuntu suffers the same problem, if you wait long enough. I'm pretty sure I have an Ubuntu install that I waited too long to upgrade.
It is enough to make me serious consider switching to FreeBSD, except I don't think the 3D (game engine) library I want to use is supported.
If she's like mine she's going to tell you everything is fine and when you visit her in a few months you'll see it isn't working.
I once helped my grandma, on the phone, navigate through a VCR to record a star trek episode. Everything was going well but I came home to an empty VHS.
"I told you it was fine so you wouldn't worry."
I miss my grandma more than that episode of star trek.
This might be a bit too much to expect grandma to perfectly type, but "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" to update her system is certainly easier then trying to describe what to click on a graphical UI.
Or even get the legendary confusion of them never having turned the machine on in the first place.
Generally, after years of experience doing exactly this, I've found it is a lot easier to dictate a literal sequence of characters over the phone than coordinate a complex visual action with only confused verbal feedback.
Of course, with terminal stuff, you have even further options in, say, sending an email with an attached bash file for them to download and click, or if this continues, set up a script for them (and ad an icon for it in their start menu) that ssh's them into a handy aws or digital ocean instance so you can then ssh into their machine from the comfort of your own home and do it yourself.
It give something to start with but still requires human intervention from someone who knows how to navigate in this mess.
If you're provisioning machines on a regular basis it's a different story, but if it's your own personal machine that you're reinstalling maybe every couple years this seems like the most straightforward approach.
Also: Use LVM and snapshot before updating to save yourself a lot of headaches.
Deleting older versions of packages that people may still be relying on seems like a very obvious no-go in a dependency management system. Any idea why this happens regardless? Is it just a matter of costs? Or is there more nuance to it that I'm missing?
Visible behaviour and functionality is changed or removed without user involvement, choice or recourse, turning every update into a game of Russian Roulette. Even LTS builds don't mean no breakage of behaviours users rely on.
From the developer's POV maintaining security/bugfix-only forks of every feature branch rapidly becomes intractable as a project gains complexity / matures. Meanwhile, for startups, "move fast and break things" is the creed. So as we demand more from our software overall, this situation can only get worse, not better.
The temptation for modern users to say "you know what? it's MY bloody computer, not yours; my problems are actually more important to me than whatever you think you're solving" and unplug from the update streams is overwhelming.
I would maintain a local apt repository for that situation.
Which one? It's entirely possible that it is (or that it's not 'supported', but you could easily compile it there anyway).
I've only been using it for a little while on a couple systems, but seems nice enough. (Mint or regular Debian for years otherwise.)
I ditched ubuntu in the deepest hole I could find because every 6 months was a nightmare, and I replaced it with linux mint which seemed to actually work.
Then I had to deal with such system upgrade and this was a real pain, so instead I replaced linux mint with linux mint debian edition and things went well for a while.
Then came the system upgrade time again, it was not as painful as with regular mint but it was still a pain to manage.
My grandma managed to deal with her everyday use of the computer but there is no way she could manage the mint system upgrade part by herself. So the computer lived for a while with only the non system upgrade until I switched her to manjaro which allows her to have a roling release and deal with system upgrades herself.
The Gnome software center makes it easy to find and install apps too, reminds me of click n run from Linspire.
I've been using Linux for almost 2 decades and I've abandoned numerous projects over the years because the community was so unhelpful. The most recent was an Asterisk box for a home VoIP server back around 2012, before that it was a MythTV box in 2008.
The main problem is that until it gets better it ends up alienating a lot of people because the standard support from the community is "did you RTFM?"
The topics can vary from "the nature of choice" to something like what GP posted.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
However for most non-PC people they want to click a browser icon. That is easy and stable.
Same, except for my 70 year old parents. I switched them from Windows to Ubuntu MATE. All I had to do was simply rename the Firefox icon to "Internet" and they were good to go.