151–160 of 299 posts
I really would like to do the same. My father is always complaining about Windows problems that just don't happen with Mint/Ubuntu, and my mom has an machine that's too weak and old to run windows properly. The one thing that prevent me to do that is that they use their computer for work. While I'm certain that I wouldn't have any problem doing their job with Linux, they ask me "can you absolutely guarantee that I'll…
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The point here is that the solution is simply to get better hardware, which is much less expensive outside the Apple ecosystem.
In my experience the same hardware when ran under Windows does not have these issues. EDIT: also just want to say I'm not anti-Linux, I'm just being realistic. I understand Linux's history and how it has some disadvantages (and advantages). I'm just saying at the end of the day, my interest is a reliable machine, regardless of how I get there.
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it's a pain to have to locate and reinstall from scratch all the packages I need. dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 > ~/installed_pkgs.log cat installed_pkgs.log | xargs sudo apt install
Tell that to your grandmother over the phone and see how much of a pain it is :)
If she's like mine she's going to tell you everything is fine and when you visit her in a few months you'll see it isn't working.
I once helped my grandma, on the phone, navigate through a VCR to record a star trek episode. Everything was going well but I came home to an empty VHS.
"I told you it was fine so you wouldn't worry."
I miss my grandma more than that episode of star trek.
My 97 year old grandpa has a MacBook Pro and a few years back he was constantly on the phone with my mom trying to fix issues. We installed a Remote Desktop server so my mom could fix things quickly. After a visit we diagnosed the problem. Because of his poor motorskills, he was clicking and clicking-and-dragging things by accident. To mitigate this, we installed some software that locked the applications in the dock…
You should get him an iPad or consider it. My grandpa who’s 94 won’t use anything else. That said he’s probably used to the setup now.
After the 100th or so malware they got I told them very emphatically they should change their bank account info, knowing full well it would be a huge pain in the ass for them. Yes I was a dick, but they were stupid. And they stole 600k from the federal government.
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…
So my personal anecdote also involves mint - I've set one up for someone years ago(probably around 2013-2014) and you're right, it had no issues. However, when I came over to visit last year I wanted to do some maintenance, so "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" would be the start. Nope, turns out that the update servers for that version of Mint have been switched off long time ago and none of the links resolve an…
I ditched ubuntu in the deepest hole I could find because every 6 months was a nightmare, and I replaced it with linux mint which seemed to actually work.
Then I had to deal with such system upgrade and this was a real pain, so instead I replaced linux mint with linux mint debian edition and things went well for a while.
Then came the system upgrade time again, it was not as painful as with regular mint but it was still a pain to manage.
My grandma managed to deal with her everyday use of the computer but there is no way she could manage the mint system upgrade part by herself. So the computer lived for a while with only the non system upgrade until I switched her to manjaro which allows her to have a roling release and deal with system upgrades herself.
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
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Installing Linux on your parents' computer and then having them give up and get support from a local store is less work for you than properly teaching them to use Linux before installing it on their computer and then providing support whenever they have issues.
It depends, i would not recommend this for all cases, as the article mentions it worked because this following things applied 1 you were already wasting your time when visiting the parents on fixing the computer 2 the parents were transitioned to the Linux cmpatible applications like Firefox,Chrome, VLC, 3 all the parents workflows were accounted for and were met by Linux 4 the switch is done to Ubuntu LTS and not so…
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iPads have decent keyboard cases now. I considered getting one to replace my laptop last month but decided against it because it's not really viable for coding yet.
IMO, those keyboards are ok for some quick notes, but for anything longer, its going to give you issues (unless you have tiny hands).