Gnu/Linux
Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
241–250 of 299 posts
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#242> Do yourself a favor and use standard Ubuntu. Do yourself a favor and use standard Debian. Honestly, I don't know why anyone bothers with Ubuntu anymore. It doesn't really add much over Debian except for it's shitty release cycle.
I think your wording was a bit too hostile, but I basically agree. If you yourself are comfortable with Debian, you can just install stable and ignore it for years in a way you just can't with Mint or Ubuntu. Every time I've tried it I've always just ended up switching them after the n-th time of finding out the automatic updates broke at some random point a year or so ago and now there are weird problems with the sources and things not parsing correctly when I try to manually update.
Debian stable with xfce is a good enough XP-ish interface that no one really gets confused by it, and is stable enough that you can just forget about it for like forever and everything is still fine.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#243I also switched my parents off Windows to Ubuntu for a while (when I used Linux desktop myself and before OS X). It worked pretty well and didn't cause them too much pain. Subsequently of course I got them to switch to Apple and that's even better, primarily because they don't have to feel that they're using some weird thing their child encouraged them to use. Avoids the Windows nonsense of computer getting slower and slower all the time, and malware. The only thing I've failed to help them with is the baffling Apple stuff surrounding iCloud and storage on multiple devices.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#244> Do yourself a favor and use standard Ubuntu. Do yourself a favor and use standard Debian. Honestly, I don't know why anyone bothers with Ubuntu anymore. It doesn't really add much over Debian except for it's shitty release cycle.
Ubuntu has non-free software enabled out of the box unlike Debian. To me this is a negative, but to some it could be the difference between their wifi working or not. It's not that this is hard to change, but if you're already planning to make changes right away, maybe it's not the best distro for your parents. I've taken a liking to some pretty niche distros in the last few years. GuixSD and Void in particular. I us…
Eh, I think generally if you want to set up linux for a non-technical person, regardless you're going to need to personally spend a couple hours configuring and setting everything up for them initially, so the difference of editing sources.list and adding "main contrib non-free" to a couple lines is pretty minimal.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#245Earlier 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…
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…
> I don't think the 3D (game engine) library I want to use is supported
Which one? It's entirely possible that it is (or that it's not 'supported', but you could easily compile it there anyway).
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#246My dad needed to play a video file sent to him by a lawyer recently. I assume it wasn’t QuickTime compatible.
Well, he couldn’t get in touch with me and installed some crazy video player he paid for on the App Store. I was shocked.
Literally, the first result when I search for “video player Mac” on Google is something for VLC.
Why is it so hard for less technically knowledgeable users to find reliable, spam/malware/marketing-bullshit free software?
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#247Gnu/Linux
rms identified
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#248Skype is not mentioned on the page. I guess, we live in different realities.
Skype works well on linux
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It's been pretty much down hill since then. Had multiple cases where the client works, and the web links don't. Or the weblinks work and the client doesn't. Sometimes calls work... but not receiving invites... or vice versa.
All the users I knew that used skype regularly have fled.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#249Related aside, what's the best way to run Microsoft Office on a Linux box? My ideal setup would be Linux for everything but Office programs, which I'd prefer to run in a Windows environment.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#250I got my parents and mother-in-law to get a chromebook. Never had a question.
My mom has been on a chromebook for years and I only occasionally get easy help questions. For simple web browser usage it doesn't get much easier.