191–200 of 356 posts
They do not have pre-juices on stuff.
My mum uses linux since she was 65. It was her _first_ contact with an O.S., she did learn to use most things on her own.
In all that cases, they didn't deal with hardware choices, software stack choices, incompatibilities in those layers... they just did get a working browser, spreadsheet or messenger... and used it.
We did a similar thing with my inlaws, leaving an ipad behind to facetime with their grandson, and recently they called because they couldn't see their new mails anymore (their provider changed the imap servers), they also happened to mainly browse sites on the ipad now, installed a few other apps for learning english and we don't hear about windows problems as much as before (they still need the laptop for standard Word/Excel/Powerpoint work and to print since they don't own a blessed HP model)
As you did we give them an opportunity to switch to linux, but they would need a well supported and preinstalled machine somehow, and that's not trivial to find. DELL seems to have some available on their net store, but it's a hard pill to swallow for people used to buy VAIO laptops in person and in store (not that they cared about the brand, but they look very nice and the sales person is reassuring).
Going the Apple route would bring more or less the same upsides as ubuntu, while skipping all the hardware support parts, giving real exclusive advantages (battery life etc), the bonus being they'd see anouncement in the press they'd understand what the fuss it is about. Linux could be viable, but it seems too late now that the Apple lineup is leaps and bound ahead of everyone else.
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(La)TeX is a half-decent language to write layout scripts in. That's mostly because of the good libraries available. (The language itself sucks a bit. It was never really meant for general computation, and it shows.)
Having done several years of college using LaTeX religiously, I can safely say it isn't a replacement for Word. I found my documents were immaculate, but I wasted a lot of time on relatively simple things (getting the pt's right, margin's, title pages, etc..)
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The thing is Windows XP, with all its warts, will still run comfortably on a 6 or 8 year PC that was low-end when it was new. A few weeks ago, when my wife's old XP computer finally wouldn't boot anymore I got a new hard drive and tried to run Ubuntu on it. Couldn't even get through the installer without it freezing up. Lubuntu installed but wasn't stable. OpenBSD with KDE was pretty good, and I would have stayed wit…
Ubuntu seems horribly bloated, and the installation takes forever. Try Knoppix livecd, they have a pretty quick program to flash the installation to an external usb. Plus you can get all the latest debian packages.
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That's what drives me craziest about programming in windows, the freak'n console is awful
That's what I never got about Windows and especially Windows devs. How can you get anything done with all that clicking and no unix tools?
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What kind of Dutch school is that? High school? I studied Computer Science at University of Amsterdam. I think I was the only one who was using windows. (I would ssh into a university computer to do most programming).
In the Netherlands, there is a vast difference in Linux usage between universities and HBO/MBO schools. At the company I work for, we regularly have interns from a HBO school and virtually none of them ever worked on Linux. We require them to work on Linux for the whole duration of their internship.
google-google Awh in Rotterdam, a bit too far away for me. Sounded like an interesting place to intern at!
Edit: No way to escape asterisks it seems, they'll be italic ifnot surrounded by whitespace no matter what :/
Both my parents are 60+. My mom is perfectly fine using Ubuntu on my old x61 for email, browsing, and YouTube. To be fair she could probably replace it with a tablet if it weren't for the fact that she visits a lot of flash sites (Chinese TV streaming sites). Likewise my dad is on another Ubuntu machine at home. His work needs access to some software / printers that can't be run via Wine so he's stuck with Windows th…
She has been mostly happy, I found running printers to be less fun than it could be and the linux photo management apps aren't always that great. Recently gave her a thinkpad with Mint and she is still happy.
The main point might be that your parents aren't technical people (whatever that means), and the laptop was set from the start (they never had to care about hardware compatibilities). We did a similar thing with my inlaws, leaving an ipad behind to facetime with their grandson, and recently they called because they couldn't see their new mails anymore (their provider changed the imap servers), they also happened to m…
"learning english"
Funny, I had to fix a very similar issue with my french in-laws IMAP just yesterday. Just for science, are your in-laws French and using Free.fr as an ISP?