Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.
Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.
you can add sudo permissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give her sudo permission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.
My dad never uses anything other than a browser and an email program. I guess the file manager? I’m pretty sure he never installed anything on Mint so far.
He still needs sudo to uodate tho.
/j then you don’t love your mother enough to learn coding and make a mom-proof distro.
/uj oh my god I have ptsd from the one time my parents tried to switch to apple products. It lasted less than a week. Please don’t let them decide to switch to Linux and ask me things.
It’s a good thing that new and unexperienced users who want to learn 😃 on the internet get recommendations such as “use rm -fr / to remove the french language pack and fix your localization issues” and then ending up with an expensive, broken hardware (/s)
rm -rf / only deletes everything on the / partition and any currently mounted filesystems, since efi is its own partition and not mounted it wouldn’t be touched
It could. It just doesn’t want to. Why would it? Its your computer.
If you want to delete / including the EFI partition turning your machine into a paperweight you should be allowed to do so.
Now that’s Free Speech if I ever saw it!
I don’t want my mom to be able to turn her computer into a paperweight…
Use an easy to use immutable distro like Fedora silverblue
Don’t give her sudo permission then.
How she will install anything then
My mom needs a computer for work, but she keeps bludgeoning people to death with it. What should I do?! Linux must have a solution for this!
Just to be clear, the person answering Flatpaks isn’t being flippant. Any tools, editors or games that Mom wants, she can safely install by searching and clicking ‘intall’, all without enough permissions to harm her computer.
Linux, for less technical parents, is genuinely really nice, now.
you can add
sudopermissions for individual users for certain commands only; and i recommend you would do that; i.e. give hersudopermission for installing/uninstalling applications, but nothing else.uninstalls the kernel package
My dad never uses anything other than a browser and an email program. I guess the file manager? I’m pretty sure he never installed anything on Mint so far.
He still needs sudo to uodate tho.
Flatpaks
You can give her limited sudo rights; even limit her to install and upgrade operations.
While that is possible. You do have to go out of your way to do that in ways a typical user wouldn’t.
Aside from that like others have said. Just don’t give sudo perms and have them use Flatpak.
/j then you don’t love your mother enough to learn coding and make a mom-proof distro.
/uj oh my god I have ptsd from the one time my parents tried to switch to apple products. It lasted less than a week. Please don’t let them decide to switch to Linux and ask me things.
It’s a good thing that new and unexperienced users who want to learn 😃 on the internet get recommendations such as “use
rm -fr /to remove the french language pack and fix your localization issues” and then ending up with an expensive, broken hardware (/s)Besides, the real command is
rm -fr ~rm -rf /only deletes everything on the / partition and any currently mounted filesystems, since efi is its own partition and not mounted it wouldn’t be touchedI agree with you, the EFI variables shouldn’t be mounted by default. Unfortunately, on some systems, they are.
There was even a huge fight about that. I’m too lazy to look it up now, though.
Huh that’s very interesting!
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snopes does not have that in their search results