Greetings, I am asking whether Linux has helped your family or not going from Windows to a friendly distribution that caters to young or elderly.

How was your experience with helping relatives or your kids with Linux? Was it because of an older spec machine? Costs etc?

I helped get my grandmother (dad’s side) to move from windows 8.1 to Linux Mint which so far has been good, she only really browses and required some basic budgeting apps.

This was on something like an older core i3 or i5 but I didn’t hear that many problems apart from getting drivers for her Epson printer to work.

So how has it been for you?

  • TimeSquirrel
    27•2 months ago

    Not Windows, but I rooted/cracked an old Chromebook for my mother and put Gallium OS on it because newer ChromeOS wasn’t suported anymore. She was able to take care of affairs with it when my Dad passed and uses it daily still to keep in touch and manage her life. 90% of what she does takes place in Firefox, so as long as an OS has that and some basic utilities like a calc and text editor, she’s good to go.

    A $150 laptop bought in 2013 still able to accomplish modern tasks. It makes me sick thinking of the throwaway society we have created. When I pass by the neighborhood dumpster and see an entire perfectly fine big screen LCD TV with just a couple bad capacitors in the power supply. When I see entire vapes with batteries littering the ground. When Microsoft decides to arbitrarily kill off an entire previous generation of PCs with TPM.

    • @[email protected]
      7•2 months ago

      Don’t get me started on dispo vapes, the absolute worst. The juice is all bad, and the single use sucks. Much better to get a refillable pod system, even better to make your own juice but even if not, the stuff in the bottles is better than the stuff in the dispos.

    • Tech With Jake
      1•2 months ago

      Thanks for mentioning GalliumOS! I’ll be putting that on my SO’s old Chromebook now.