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Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

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Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#101

Post by [deleted] »

sandebert wrote: post #91
jamiecurle wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious about this. From 2005-2008 my mother ran Ubuntu from an install that I set up and I have to say, it was delightful in terms of "very little IT support". The problem however was that she always seemed to feel like an outsider with her friends. Do you experience anything similar. Granted this timeframe was pre-smartphone and tablet, but I am curious none the less.

Well, sort of, but not really. My mom's best friend was really jealous of mom because her computer actually worked. The friend was running WinXP, experiencing all the typical problems. So my mom didn't feel like an outsider, more like she had the luxury situation. A couple of years later Iphones and Android appeared, and as I'm an Android user she picked one of those (to simplify potential support situations) and was…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#102

Post by cleeus »

chirau wrote: post #40

I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.

I moved three relatives who's computing skill vary between "What is a file, again? Help me, my Internet is gone?!!" and "How do I use this scanner to get that document into a PDF file and send it via Thunderbird?" over to Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE, 14.04). They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#103

Post by keithpeter »

dilliwal wrote: post #52
chirau wrote: post #40

I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.

I installed Ubuntu on my Dads laptop, and believe me, he had no troubles understanding and using it. Also never heard any complains from him about virus or system slowing down. Sooo good for me. :D

https://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-un...

Canonical actually spent money on user interface testing. I can find some activity for Gnome shell but I'm having problems digging up any solid testing for KDE.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#104

Post by ekianjo »

cleeus wrote: post #102
chirau wrote: post #40

I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.

I moved three relatives who's computing skill vary between "What is a file, again? Help me, my Internet is gone?!!" and "How do I use this scanner to get that document into a PDF file and send it via Thunderbird?" over to Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE, 14.04). They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.

> They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.

If you don't want to even worry about that, include a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade as a cron job and everything will be up to date without them doing anything.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#105

Post by SXX »

chirau wrote: post #40

I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.

Just like others I installed Ubuntu on my mom laptop like 7 years ago. Transition was simple mainly because she was scared of computers all her life and different OS doesn't change much. All she need is some music CD playback, little of photo management and browser.

After many years the only problem ever occur was when she accepted upgrade proposal to Ubuntu 16.04 and then shortly after closed laptop so it's end up in half installed state. So it's would be smart not just setup unattended upgrades, but also disable all release upgrade suggestions.

Though I suppose for her ChromeOS could be enough too, but it's was too limited in offline mode and I not sure if she going to need new laptop anytime soon.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#106

Post by SXX »

ekianjo wrote: post #104
cleeus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved three relatives who's computing skill vary between "What is a file, again? Help me, my Internet is gone?!!" and "How do I use this scanner to get that document into a PDF file and send it via Thunderbird?" over to Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE, 14.04). They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.

> They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene. If you don't want to even worry about that, include a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade as a cron job and everything will be up to date without them doing anything.

There are unattended upgrades for that. Though you might need to add some dpkg options such as "force-confdef" / "force-confnew".

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#107

Post by rtpg »

kriro wrote: post #65
chirau wrote: post #40

I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.

My dad (>60, not exactly tech saavy) has been using Lubuntu for 2 years now (actually I don't even remember when we installed it might be 4 years :P). For many parents who only surf the web and do some non power user office (he uses Libre Office now) and check their mail it's the perfect solution. For his use case it's more user friendly than the Windows install because of the lack of constant update requests and ant…

yeah, people who know basically nothing aren't much of an issue, because they have no habits

The harder people to move over are ones who have ingrained certain things like "I need WinRAR to open this kind of file", and not being able to independently research for alternatives. People with mid-level computer experience, but not much experience in new environments suffer a lot on these transitions.

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#108

Post by majewsky »

Karlozkiller wrote: post #86
MichaelApproved wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm commuter savvy and tried to get HBO Now to play on Ubuntu. Searched Google and found many different commands to try and run but had no luck. How could something so simple be so difficult?

Because it's not so simple. I have no experienced with HBO Now but similar services. And typically they use DRM like Microsoft Silverlight or the like to prevent people from playing videos without proper access. The reason why such things are harder to get to work in Linux sometimes is because such DRM-solutions are not always baked in or provided by the same providers as in windows, and might be proprietary. Also co…

Of course that's correct, but we're talking about users that consider their device broken when an icon is not in its place. All they will perceive is "I cannot watch this video because Linux".

Re: Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

#110

Post by fapjacks »

Taek wrote: post #66
loeg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux hardware support is really good. Probably better than Windows and certainly better than macOS (which only has to support a very limited range of hardware).

I don't think you could call it better than Windows. A lot of wifi cards have issues, and my understanding is that printer support can be pretty bad too. If you are using a Linux machine I'd still recommend that you double check for driver support on any hardware you buy. You can expect it to be okay but you should still check. You generally don't need to check for Windows, you can just assume and you will be right e…

Win10 choked on my 7990 and an onboard NIC two or three months ago. Same machine with Linux Mint? Totally fine out of the box. After about 2007, I just stopped having hardware problems on Linux. I fully did not expect to start having hardware problems with plain jane hardware on later versions of Windows, though.
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