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

181–190 of 299 posts

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

#181

Post by ajmurmann »

oever wrote: post #125
jaredandrews wrote: post #44

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…

I've just returned from a philosophical café about algorithms and society. A 78 year old attendee in the audience was advocating Linux to avoid junk on your computer. He claimed it's easy for anyone to switch from Windows to Linux as he had done last year. He installed Linux Mint himself, which he claimed is easy because it's just a download and he's not a technical person himself.

What is a "philosophical Cafe"? Sounds awesome. Edit: Google sends me to https://www.cafesphilo.org/ which sounds great but seems to be mainly limited to France.

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

#182

Post by gnulinux »

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…

There are tons of people using linux distros who don't even know command line exists. One time I was helping my friend to do something. She studies design and is basically computer illiterate. Somehow she was using Ubuntu, not sure how that happened but she claimed to be very happy. Anyway, the problem was super simple, but as an i3 archlinux user I literally never use GUI so I fired a command line and solved it in one line. She was perplexed and wasn't really sure what just happened. She didn't even know what command line is. Anyway, to be more helpful, I also managed to solve the problem by clicking buttons...

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

#183

Post by meddlepal »

oever wrote: post #125
jaredandrews wrote: post #44

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…

I've just returned from a philosophical café about algorithms and society. A 78 year old attendee in the audience was advocating Linux to avoid junk on your computer. He claimed it's easy for anyone to switch from Windows to Linux as he had done last year. He installed Linux Mint himself, which he claimed is easy because it's just a download and he's not a technical person himself.

Something tells me a 78 year old attending a Philosophy meetup about Algorithms and Society is probably a hell of a lot smarter than your average 78 year old.

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

#184

Post by metildaa »

bigbugbag wrote: post #157
gambiting wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similar story, also grandmother's computer. 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 a…

This right here is why I switched to Debian. Got tired of downstream forks breaking the upgrade process, which hasn't been an issue since switching a few years back.

The Gnome software center makes it easy to find and install apps too, reminds me of click n run from Linspire.

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

#185

Post by gerdesj »

I've solely been using Linux as a workstation at home and work for about 12 years now. I used to use Gentoo on both and then switched to Arch, mainly to save my lap from melting and speed up updating.

When we got wifey her first laptop about 10 years ago, I naturally put Windows 7 on it - it was what she expected. I've also been a Windows (and NetWare 8) sysadmin for rather a longer time than Linux. It was OK (Windows 7) but the MS updates were a pain (slow) and I had problems with the GPU drivers and I had to keep on finding updates for each package/app installed. The GPU driver thing was unusual to me but happened and this was wifeys only machine and hence it was a thing.

I binned Win 7 in a final fit of pique. I backed it up and turned it into a VM (just in case) and installed Arch on the physical machine. That was three laptops ago. Each time I back it up using Clonezilla and dump it back on the next one and extend the file system to fill the new, bigger disc.

To update her laptop I ssh into it, run the update routine (aurman -Syu) whilst she is using it and schedule a reboot late at night. Normally, she does not even notice except that I do mention I'm doing it and to save open files (OK .

The reason I use a rolling distro by choice for workstations is because it is always up to date and there are no discontinuities in the lifecycle. I do not use a rolling distro for my servers (any more) for them I generally use LTS Ubuntu releases.

All my Linux (and FreeBSD) boxes update everything when updated and they do it quickly and without much fuss. My Windows and Apples do not update everything. They need each and every add on updated separately. That takes ages and you need to know that something is actually installed.

A FOSS box updates everything on an update ... everything.

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

#186

Post by boudin »

city41 wrote: post #97
thomastjeffery wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really depends. Hardware with support in kernel does work really well. I have less issue with my AMD graphic card on Linux than I had in Windows (random blue screen, gpu resets, a random driver version that will just not work). Granted, the quality really improved past years.

My work laptop is also much more stable. On windows 10, the intel driver will always blue screen when i had no more ram left. I never had one crash on Fedora.

It does require to look at hardware support first, but that's the same way than checking hardware quality before buying. I always buy things that meet my requirements, on computer hardware, one is Linux support, I don't see this as an issue.

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

#187

Post by mmarx »

rhizome wrote: post #120
phaedrus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what turned me off from Linux Mint for my own use. The catch-22 of you need to upgrade to a supported version, but the servers / packages you would need in order to do the upgrade were turned off in the meantime. To be fair, Linux Mint states that a complete reinstall is the recommended way, but since I do development, it's a pain to have to locate and reinstall from scratch all the packages I need. Also I t…

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

There's also dpkg --set-selections.

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

#188

Post by zozbot123 »

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…

If "just works" is the relevant metric, it's hard to beat Debian stable - or CentOS, or perhaps OpenSUSE Leap. Sure, the things you might be able to easily achieve with them are quite limited. But the flip side is that they will chug along nicely and reliably for years upon years, with nary a hiccup aside from the occasional security update. That's the sort of "just works" that we - and our non-technical acquaintances - are most in need of!

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

#189

Post by lgleason »

I switched my dad over to Chrome OS and never looked back. Now he tells all of this fiends to do the same thing because it's so much simpler. I really wish there was a better open source alternative because Google is evil these days but...

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

#190

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

gotorazor wrote: post #49
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.

From that perspective, the problem isn't so much the proliferation of service providers but rather the proliferation of aggressively proprietary protocols. By that I mean services that don't merely fail to document and stabilize their protocols, but actively attack and undermine third-party clients. Some of them outright ban third-party clients in their ToS, some theoretically allow third-party clients but impose API limits that are unusable at scale, and some deliberately make API/protocol changes to break clients created via reverse engineering. Anything short of that gets some kind of native Linux client if it gets popular.

That stance, in turn, is driven by business considerations that would probably be a huge tangent to discuss here. But it's important to keep in mind that this isn't just how things have always been; it's a relatively new trend, and trends can reverse.

Post reply on HN