A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend’s then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife’s friend say something funny that I thought I’d share with you.
They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid’s first computer, and his mom doesn’t have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn’t be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn’t visit that often, and the kid’s games still worked so it wasn’t a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.
When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I’d give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:
This Linux thing… We’ve never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.
Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.
My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.
I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.
I just have to do a system update every year or so.
She’s now 87.
For my my father I only have to make sure it looks not so different after each major upgrade. I have to be careful when there are new things, but apart from that he can do everything for himself except these major upgrades and backups.
So, he is happy with Fedora and Gnome classic.
I love this, because it’s exactly the opposite of the received “wisdom” you’d get from many corners of the Internet. As long as you aren’t mucking around the internals of a Linux install, it’s going to be stable, and it will be adequate for common computing tasks. Arguably, even better than adequate.
My ex father in law would always always ALWAYS install random ass flash games / random sketchy software and bork their windows PC.
He was always complaining about popups and his antivirus was always flagging a threat etc… they’d spend tons of money annually to have their computer fixed and he’d go right back to the same behavior.Anyway… I installed a dual boot setup with his windows and Linux mint.
He bitched and complained about it… but he never had any actual issues. His complaint was it was different. He ran mint until he died like 5 years later.
Honestly, if my exFIL can run Linux… anyone can.
I remember you asking about what distro to pick, what a wonderful follow-up post. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Dear OP, you totally rock. Good on you for sharing the light - and for helping that family and their 10-year old son.
In that boy’s eyes, you are of rock star status. And in mine too - and those of many others I’m sure. Keep being you.
Thanks for the kind words :)
A few years ago, I installed mint 21.1 on my mum’s old NUC; a 2013 model; was running Win7.
I said, it doesn’t meet the minimum for Win10, so it was either buy something new or try Linux.
Just got back from visiting them, I updated it to 21.3, still running fine. It still does everything they need.
Mum even said, “it always just works”. A great endorsement, as a non-technical user mum needs a no fuss distro, mint works so well in this regard.
As an early Linux adopter who tried everything under the Sun, I can only say that Mint is absolutely awesome.
