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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

#61

Post by harryf »

sandebert wrote: post #58
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.

About eight years ago I reinstalled my mother's laptop with Ubuntu (was WinXP). It was a mess before and I typically spent most of my time at my mom's actually with her laptop, trying to get it to decent speed and uninstalling miscellaneous crapware. Since I installed Ubuntu on it I actually spend my time with her, not her computer. And she's happy about that, obviously, but also that her computer just works and she…

Likewise moved my Mum to Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it dramatically improved our relationship. Hasn't all been easy e.g. photo management has been a moving target but largely it's "just worked" during that time.

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

#63

Post by minitech »

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.

How is it the least user-friendly? In Ubuntu, for example, nothing in regular use seems particularly different. My grandma started using it as her first OS at 84, and she’s still doing fine.

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

#64

Post by imode »

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.

say what you want, but my family (with no technological literacy to speak of) has been using the following distros with great success:

Linux Mint: my mother. two years since the switch and she loves it. can't say I don't either.

Arch Linux: my significant other. a year since she adopted it, and she can find her way around just fine.

FreeBSD: my father. with i3 and a couple of scripts, he's able to boot up into a single-use environment and do what he wants. very simple and easy and I don't have to touch his laptop for a long time.

so.. user friendly? user friendliness depends on the interface that you slap onto the front of the operating system. turns out, there are different UIs for different purposes!

and that's why linux is a good choice. underneath, it's secure, maintainable, and free. on top, it can look like anything you want, thanks to X and the various DE/WMs.

my mother needs a full-on Windows-like GUI, start menu and all. my SO needs a slim interface so she uses fluxbox, which with a click of her mouse has everything she needs in a convenient menu (plus workspaces), and my father doesn't need anything but a web browser.

the kernel doesn't matter to them if you dress it up nicely.

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

#65

Post by kriro »

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 antivirus stuff etc. etc. It's also faster on the same machine and the computer doesn't clog down every n month. I still remember that he asked me about 6 month in why the computer doesn't get slower :P

I'm fairly confident that a switch from Windows to macOS would have been a lot harder for him btw. Same for a switch to Windows 10 without making it look like the old Windows actually (not as confident in that statement as I don't know enough about Win10).

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

#66

Post by Taek »

loeg wrote: post #56
dimino wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Available desktop environments for Linux are nowhere near ready for wide consumer use, and hardware support is abysmal compared to macOS and Windows. Linux is best for servers.

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 every time.

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

#67

Post by greglindahl »

sclb wrote: post #59
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. ChromeOS is Linux. The principal difference between ChromeOS and Ubuntu is that if you want to run something other than Chrome then on Ubuntu you may and on ChromeOS you don't. And the likes of Ubuntu have been easier to use than Windows for five years or more. The utility of Window…

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modif…

This is an excellent example of a bad place and time for this kind of evangelism.

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

#68

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Tons of people have done it, and what the average non-technical user does is trivial on all of those operating systems. Anyway, Linux has half a dozen desktop UIs - referring to the user-friendliness of Linux as a unitary thing just makes it seem like you don't have a lot of experience in what you're criticizing.

edit: The best thing about Linux for non-technical people is that the GUIs don't change radically (for marketing purposes) every year or two. Once you get used to something, you can generally keep it, and changes and modernizations will accumulate slowly instead of forcing an adjustment all at once.

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

#69

Post by jcoffland »

dimino wrote: post #53
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.

Available desktop environments for Linux are nowhere near ready for wide consumer use, and hardware support is abysmal compared to macOS and Windows. Linux is best for servers.

Have you even used Linux?

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

#70

Post by mirimir »

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.

Well, "We designed the WOW! Computer for seniors and baby boomers with little or no experience using computers."

And "The WOW! Computer runs on a Linux operating system we’ve customized to support our touch screen capabilities. We chose Linux to avoid frequent problems with viruses and to provide a more secure, problem-free computer environment. Linux has been developed over the last 20 years by numerous companies and currently runs on millions of computers. In fact, about 60% of all internet servers run Linux."

So ...

https://www.mywowcomputer.com/faqs.aspx

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