Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

write.as

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 299 posts

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#41

Post by Proven »

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.

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#42

Post by bor0 »

city41 wrote: post #39

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 pare…

Exactly why I switched from Xubuntu to Mac 5 years ago. I just want to do my work, not fix my system after every minor upgrade.

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#43

Post by l1am0 »

dj_brown_sugar wrote: post #37

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 sa…

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

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#44

Post by jaredandrews »

Just to add another anecdote...

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)_/¯

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#47

Post by alexandernst »

I did the same with my parents. At first, it worked good enough. But soon the support calls started again, and they shifted from "my PC is slow" to "how to I connect X to my PC", being "X" anything from "printers" to "Point&shoot cameras" to "my iPhone so I can transfer my photos".

Unpopular opinion: I just switched them again, this time to Mac. 0 support calls since then.

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#48

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

benbristow wrote: post #27
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #5

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.

Unless you've installed Wine....

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#49

Post by gotorazor »

dsr_ wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

#50

Post by gbil »

city41 wrote: post #39

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 pare…

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

Post reply on HN