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?
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 SO runs Mint on one of her older laptops, and aside from an audio driver issue, I’ve had no problems maintaining it, and she finds it pretty user friendly.
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
That sounds like the non-techies would be able to fix it themselves on Windows without you being around, which in my experince isn’t the case.
It might be different for you with a lot of tech-affine people in your family. But for those of us being forced to be the tech support anyway, it can really make a difference if you have to fix a Linux issue once in a while or have to reinstall Windows for the 5th time this year…
Modern distros are very resilient as long as you stick to the big ones, maybe even more than windows. There’s plenty of benefits for regular people too. A few off the top of my mind, the OS doesn’t have ads, no privacy minefield, less malware. Gotta keep in mind that at the end of the day, most people only use their pc to open the browser.
At which point the safer bet is to get them a Chromebook which is supported by Google and not by you
Chromebooks are a privacy nightmare and have shitty lifespans though. It’s a poor comparison too because at this point you’re buying new hardware instead of installing different software.
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”
