I got tired of dealing with windows 11 weirdness and my mother asking me how to make it work, so I installed linux on her laptop.So far she's been able to do her zoom calls and stuff, after I coached her a little. It's working pretty smoothly for her now, much better than windows was.Has anyone had experience in putting linux on tech noob family/friends computers? how did it work out for you?
>so I installed linux on her laptopWhat distro?
>>108822074Debian stable with XFCE
>>108822036Yes, my granny has Linux Mint on an old ass laptop, she uses it just to search for music notes. And many people in our family use her laptop to print. No issues.But she also uses an old phone for pictures and whatsapp. I was blown away when my granny manged to use her phone to take a pic of a car crash. I feel like normies only use PC's for work now and do all of their shit on the phone.
>>108822036My Dad uses MX Linux and he seems fine with it.
it's fine as long as they don't need to install programs for themselves or touch a terminal. my mother has arch and kde on her laptop, it stays frozen in time until I go there and update it myself, she only uses a browser and libreoffice anyway
>>108822170How often are you leaving it not updated? I thought Arch ran into issues if you didn't update after like 2 months or so?
>>108822214once I haven't updated my Arch desktop for 6 months or so, update went smooth, nothing bad happened and worked like always
>>108822036my tech-illiterate father was able to use Debian XFCE on my old laptop for a year without any problems. I needed the laptop back and it was well-maintained, as I'd instructed. granted, I think the extent of use was email and youtube videos.
>>108822253Hm, I guess /g/ was wrong after all.>>108822279>>108822170If all they're doing is browser work (literally everything in it: Gsuite, MS365, Discord) any distro would work, really.It's when you get into the nitty gritty like Zoom that stuff starts to *record scratch noise here* because you have to figure out if those Linux versions of Windows applications for Zoom are .rpm, .deb, .tar.gz and the like and it becomes a huge pain in the ass keeping track of all that.
I'm just about to do this for a family member. Everything she needs is browser-based these days, so there's unlikely to be many problems. If there are, at least I won't have to deal with fixing windows for her anymore.
Try Linux for Niggers!
the poster above is from lesotho btw
>>108822214arch starts acting up if you don't update it and when you do it's to find out plapplay and latex and jeetvm and others have released a 30 petabyte update that, you guessed it, deletes every dependency they have then immediately throws fifteen errors for each
>>108822036>So far she's been able to do her zoom calls and stuff, after I coached her a little. It's working pretty smoothly for her now, much better than windows was.Zoom is one of the only apps I use that gives me trouble on Linux (still on X11). The window follows me around when I switch desktops, instead of just staying where I put it. And if I try to change the system volume during a meeting, using the taskbar widget, the gnome session hangs and I have to restart it. So I run zoom in a Windows 11 VM.
Googlebooks will basically make Linux normieproof, but you will be tied to Google Play approved apps.
>>108822745> Have to run zoom in a windows vm because gnome breaks apart if you try to run itWayland is truly the future, 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop thanks to Wayland
>>108822036Worked out fine. The most important thing for old people who are clueless with tech is consistency. No updates causing random changes to the user experience, no random popups, everything just needs to keep working and looking exactly the same all the time and they'll be fine. Linux is much better than modern Windows in this aspect.
>>108822214>>108822530>arch starts acting up if you don't update itNo it doesn't, what the fuck is this meme?The only real issue is that updating becomes difficult and often requires manual intervention after a long pause.t. Used to maintain my dad's PC with Arch/XFCE, updated every 6 months when visiting family. After his death I left it be but my nephews still play old games on it occasionally, it hasn't been updated for almost 4 years but there are no issues.
>>108822111>I was blown away when my granny manged to use her phone to take a pic of a car crash.beat the shit out of that hag.rubberneck scum.
>>108822036worked semi well until they had to face reality with amd's shitty drivers. People can't be bothered troubleshooting graphics drivers ended up buying a mac mini which is also hated because macos is fucking slow for some reason. At least the first impression of linux was good so it has improved a lot but still not good enough.
>>108822036gem
>>108822036I did this for my mothers desktop, I went with debian (mate), now it never crashes and no random shit installed by.the niece and nephew. My mom only uses firefox and her printer so it is the same experience as Windows for her, over 4 years now
>>108823657usecase for gem?
>>108823540wtf are you talking about? are you implying your mother is missing overclocking settings
>>108822369Isn't that called Android now?
ebussy fanart thread?
>>108822036>Has anyone had experience in putting linux on tech noob family/friends computers? Only for a friend of mine, he asked me to revive an old ass compaq laptop, i installed on it devuan + xfce4 (with a windows-like desktop ui setup)>how did it work out for you?He's happy, to the point he's not going to get a new laptop for the time being, afterall he just needed it for office stuff (libreoffice calc sufficed for him) and playing some old games from his steam collection.
>>108824309what sort of vintage was it? like ~2010 or so?
>>108824262beard is wrong; it should hang under his jaw rather than circle around his mouth like that.
My dad's desktop has been running Ubuntu for close to a decade. He doesn't need to install shit everyday and practically lives in the browser. Much more stable and runs smoothly on his dogshit PC unlike windows. No sudo for him so he's never managed to break it.Switching him to a laptop running fedora silverblue soon. I don't see him very often so everytime I'd visit it was a pain with everything being so out-of-date and I was afraid unattended upgrades might leave him without a working computer.
>>108822036when my family buy new laptops the windows garbage preinstalled doesn’t even get to boot once, I immediately install mint. no problems so far, just set it to auto update
>>108824262thanks for my new github profile picture
>most reddit tier thread on this board award
>>108824428Nah, it was something around 2004-5 tops, the poor thing had 1GiB of ram in total (which i expanded to 4 using some spare old i had abandoned in a drawer). I picked devuan because i figured that systemd was going to probably struggle on that potato.
>>108822036>non techie parents and familyI got tired of dealing with winblows issues on my old home desktop computer that my grandma uses to read the news, get the weather forecast and check her e-mail. Switched it over to ubuntu LTS years ago and she's had no issues.
>>108822036use case for women?
>>108822214quite a few versions behind, I can tell with the default wallpaper. sometimes a pacman knowledge is required (because it refuses to do certain things by default), but I never broke her installation by delaying updates
>>108822110Fucking retard. Just use Mint like a normal person.
