Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not in the US where I suspect a majority of HN readers come from.
I'd be interested to see numbers. I'd guess plurality, but not majority.
That would be interesting to a poll on
Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
201–210 of 299 posts
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You found the right thing. It's mostly French and exclusively European. They're places to discuss ideas and theories respectfully and civilly. I don't think the same thing exists in America in any form.
The topics can vary from "the nature of choice" to something like what GP posted.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#203I got all my grandparents iPads. The only tech support calls I get is when they forget their Apple ID passwords. Thankfully, I know them all.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#204Just 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…
You might have had that problem in 2013, since Mint editions were based on the latest Ubuntu release. But since May 2014, all releases of Mint are based instead on Ubuntu LTS release. This means they get support for five years, rather than 9 months. For example Mint 17 (May 2014) has support and updates that will only cease this April. The latest release, 19.1, is supported for 10 years, until 2028.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not very often you see Click-N-Run mentioned. Early versions had an easter egg if you queued apps to install whose first letters spelled ClicknRun, then pressed Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#206I 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...
Yes, I think the ChromeBook idea is probably the best "computer as managed appliance" for our older relatives these days, BUT I really would prefer to get the OS from a company that didn't have so much interest in surveilling and managing society.
It's a bit of a chore, but you can switch off surveillance on Chromebooks through a series of configuration changes:
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/keep-google-spying-kids-c...
Combine with the usual DuckDuckGo, Apple Maps/OpenStreetMap, Posteo, uBlock Origin, and friends, and you have a pretty good maintenance-free privacy solution.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#207[deleted]
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of whether these conditions apply, teaching your parents to use new software is more work than doing nothing.
It depends, if they only use a browser,solitaire,image viewer and video player then the Linux equivalent are very similar or better. If they use some exotic software then I agree with you. But keep in mind that there are people that will have no idea that you changed the software, I was called by a neighbor to check why his laptop has no longer sound, somehow he muted Windows without knowing(maybe he hit some keyboar…
If it's not always more work to retrain people with no tech skills than to not do it, will you retrain every such person in the country? You're already not doing it, so this won't increase your workload at all.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it doesn't work that way as some package name have changed and the command fails due to some package not existing anymore. It give something to start with but still requires human intervention from someone who knows how to navigate in this mess.
It gets worse when dependencies have changed and now you've installed a library that's incompatible with the dependencies of an app you need and everything grinds to a halt.
Yeah, I've found that enough things change between installs that it's really tough to automate the process. Instead I keep a document that lists all the steps I need to set up my dev machine from scratch (with a data backup), and each time I go through the process I update the document. That makes it much less taxing than trying to figure out and remember everything without a guide, but is flexible enough to handle the inevitable differences from one time to the next.
If you're provisioning machines on a regular basis it's a different story, but if it's your own personal machine that you're reinstalling maybe every couple years this seems like the most straightforward approach.
Also: Use LVM and snapshot before updating to save yourself a lot of headaches.
Re: Switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mom's NUC has never caused any trouble running the latest Ubuntu. Network printer, scanner, wireless mouse, webcam, bluetooth headphones, USB hard drives, sleep/hibernation... not a single problem.
Which NUC model is it? I looked into NUCs a couple years ago but at the time they had a reputation of not being great with Linux.
I have a NUC5CPYH (it was very cheap). It was too slow for my liking, but everything worked, including Ubuntu, OpenBSD, Haiku, etc.
ChromiumOS is perfect for it. It's distributed by Neverware as CloudReady OS.