Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.

It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!

  • @RustedSwitch
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    25910 months ago

    I don’t have any reason to not trust OP, but the likelihood of this conversation happening at ALL seems incredibly unlikely. Never mind that it is described as successful.

    If true, this is amazing.

    • squiblet
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      5610 months ago

      I don’t get why she would take her mouse to the grocery store rather than just ask her son, who installed it for her. All I could guess would be, her old mouse didn’t work so she went out and bought one?

      • @[email protected]
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        5710 months ago

        I’m assuming OP meant a store like Target or Walmart that have groceries and also a tech section

        • @[email protected]OP
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          4610 months ago

          Yes, it’s a bigger store where the bottom floor is groceries and the top is more of a department store with a few shelves of computer and phone stuff, among other things.

          • @lunarul
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            1210 months ago

            Changing the setting from a grocery isle to an electronics department makes for a completely different story. Goes from “yeah, sure, that happened” to “perfectly credible encounter.”

            • Tippon
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              910 months ago

              I’ve had people ask me about random things in the food aisles before now, simply because I’ve been the first ‘young’ person they’ve run into since they picked up the item.

              *I’m in my 40s, but on a weekday afternoon, it’s mostly elderly people in some supermarkets. I still know nothing about Pokemon though…

      • @[email protected]
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        2710 months ago

        All the grocery stores around where I live sell pretty much everything; electronics, car accessories, hardware like lights, screwdrivers, pliers etc. And yes, also fruits, vegetables, meats, deli, etc.

    • poVoq
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      10 months ago

      I literally set up Ubuntu for my mother (an old lady by now) 10+ years ago, and she has absolutely no problems with it other than the occasional LTS version updates that I need to do for her. I am pretty sure the overall tech-support I had to do for her over all these years is actually lower as it is much more difficult to accidentally mess up a desktop Linux than some Windows installation.

      I live a few hours away from her and can’t just go out and buy her a new mouse (and she doesn’t like online shopping), so the OP story could be exactly her to the letter (except she isn’t using Linux Mint).

      • @[email protected]
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        2610 months ago

        I literally set up Ubuntu for my mother…

        I’ve never seen someone so brazenly bragging about elder abuse before.

        • squiblet
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          1310 months ago

          My mother did way better with Ubuntu than Windows (also, that was 2010-2014 and Ubuntu seemed a bit better back then)

          • @ladyanita22
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            10 months ago

            So does mine. I installed Fedora on an old, 4GB laptop connected to a monitor for her to watch Netflix and TV on her bed. We literally reused a laptop from 2013, an old 900p monitor and a VGA cable + a cheap, poor quality Amazon speaker I was not using at all. I’m really happy with how everything turned out.

        • @sep
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          310 months ago

          Agreed!, my relatives get Debian

      • @[email protected]
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        710 months ago

        I installed Fedora on my aunt’s laptop she runs an eBay business with. She only ever used Excel for a spreadsheet she tracks her accounts with and Chrome for her listings. Replaced them with Libre office calc and Chromium, didn’t really need to explain anything to her

      • @RustedSwitch
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        510 months ago

        Yeah, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just incredibly unlikely.

        The number of people out there that fit the description of your mother is low.

        The number of people that could have intelligently answered the question is a bit higher, but still low.

        The likelihood of those 2 people meeting in a store not dedicated to computer tech, and having this exact conversation, is like… monkeys playing Mozart level unlikely. ;)

        • @[email protected]OP
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          910 months ago

          I completely agree, it was one in a million and I was extremely surprised when it happened.

          I’ve never been on the receiving end of a “that happened” before. Not really sure what to do about it. But I get it.

        • some_guy
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          10 months ago

          Good thing you’re here to sus out the BS, otherwise we might all have been hoodwinked by OP recalling this friendly conversation at a store.

          Honestly at this point you’ve spent longer trying to explain why it’s made up than OP took to write it.

          Are you happy with the person that you are? I can’t imagine you’re very pleasant to spend time with.

          • @RustedSwitch
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            310 months ago

            Yeah, I’m content with who I am.

            Your assumption regarding my goal is wrong though. I took care to explain my thoughts in a way that didn’t deny the possibility outright. No worries if you missed that, or are skeptical.

            I think most can agree (even if you don’t) that the chances of this are just wild. That itself was interesting enough to me that I chose to type out 2 comments. I’m told commenting/contributing is the point of being on lemmy?

            Anyway, I don’t know who pissed in your wheaties, but I hope your day improves from here.

    • @ladyanita22
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      1510 months ago

      I mean, it could be possible that the box of the mouse said something like kernel 2.6+. Considering that is older than 2011, OP’s answer was absolutely spot on.

    • @[email protected]
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      410 months ago

      Why is this sweet old lady carrying a mouse around the grocery store asking about decades old kernel versions lol

    • TimeSquirrel
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      10 months ago

      My father, who taught computer science for the US Army, later became a government contractor, and for whom Unix systems were bread and butter, is now retired and farts around on a Mac reading political blogspam all day.

      My mother, having never had any interest or real education in computing in her entire life, now uses Linux Mint to take care of important shit and keep the family organized.

      • @TeddE
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        10 months ago

        With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).

        Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)

        • @[email protected]
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          610 months ago

          Yeah, I was playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game on Linux Mint the other day. It blows my mind what Proton can do.

        • Lupec
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          110 months ago

          As someone who regularly games on a Deck and occasionally uses Nobara on a desktop, it definitely shows, yeah. Incredible how far we’ve come in that regard.

          I do still stick with Windows on desktop 90% of the time because unfortunately it seems some of the more advanced NVIDIA features I use very often like DLDSR are unlikely to ever make their way to the Linux drivers, but that’s a petty me problem.
          I definitely agree that for the vast majority of users it’s a pretty good experience nowadays unless one can’t make do without the handful of games with unsupported anticheat and such.

      • @WldFyre
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        110 months ago

        Do most newer fighting games work on Linux? I usually play multiplayer games and the anti cheats usually don’t work on Linux, but I’m not sure how modern fighting games are set up.

        • @Rabu932
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          210 months ago

          I play Strive, SF6 and BBCF fine on my desktop linux PC. Had some technical problems with sf6 when I had a Nvidia gpu, but it wasn’t related to anti cheat. Works great with AMD.

          • @WldFyre
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            10 months ago

            Thanks for the info! Would you know if Tekken works? Or how to find out?

  • @[email protected]
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    7010 months ago

    Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers.

    Next on things that totally happened today…

  • @Leviathan
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    6110 months ago

    Before I decide whether this story is real I need to know what OP looks like that some lady singled him out in public to ask a Linux related question. OP, do you wear a wizard hat in public? Were you buying Doritos and Mountain Dew? I must know.

  • ColorcodedResistor
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    10 months ago

    i worked in sales long enough to know that No, No sweet older lady ever spoke those words to you “setup on linux mint” and include the capacity for understanding hardware compliances? did everyone in the store clap too? but…it would be a nice fantasy ngl

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      With what I’ve been through, I’m beginning to wonder if OP is telling the truth 😂

      About 7 years ago I got a call from some random lady in her 70s. Turns out her husband passed away not long ago and every computer in the house had Linux Mint installed. She needed someone to help her with some various simple techy things that her husband used to handle.

      I couldn’t help but wonder how this random lady got my phone number. Turns out that one day, my Grandfather went on a walk down the road and this lady was outside tending to her garden. I have no clue how the conversation shifted to the topic of Linux, but it did. And my Grandpa knew I was in college for Computer Science, so he just volunteered me for this task.

      Fast forward to today and I still help her out once or twice a year with whatever random questions pop up.

    • @[email protected]
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      610 months ago

      Uh my grandparents have Linux on their machine (set up a decade or more ago after I got sick of cleaning out malware/incredimail installs). They know enough to ask if stuff works on Linux though might not know to ask about Mint/Ubuntu specifically.

      TBF they usually ask me first but they’ll also ask the salesperson.

    • @[email protected]
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      410 months ago

      Do you find it impossible for an older lady to have the capacity to understand hardware compliances or use Linux?

    • Lifted_lowered
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      110 months ago

      Some sweet older ladies used to work for the NSA like my grandma, and she only had me get rid of her Linux mint partition because she wasn’t using it much

  • @[email protected]
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    4010 months ago

    I did once have a very not technical mate ask for some help with their laptop, and it was randomly running edubuntu? I was like yeah no worries I got this but why TF are you running linux, they didn’t even really understand, apparently some random friend had set them up with it because they didn’t want to pay for windows lol.

    • @[email protected]
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      2210 months ago

      edubuntu

      An education focused Ubuntu distro, weird. Also getting into Linux because it’s free is a great reason to get into Linux, if you get comfortable with it now it can help you in many STEM careers in addition to your own needs and proposes.

      • @[email protected]
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        1310 months ago

        Presumably the friend was familiar with it and didn’t want to recommend something they didn’t know.

  • Space Sloth
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    3910 months ago

    Have an elderly patron at the cafe that I volunteer at as a tech support (basically helping the old sods learn how to use their phones and connect to the new digital services from the government in Denmark) and he is a Linux user too. Dude is 79 and is the fella I go to if I have any linux questions. Think he uses an old IBM ThinkPad and practically consoles everything except his web use. I want to stay as pro as him when I turn 79!

    • Lifted_lowered
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      410 months ago

      My computer science teachers were all over 70 and *nix users, that’s the generation that created a lot of computer stuff we use to this day.

  • @pedalmore
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    3110 months ago

    This is both very likely true while also being the peak male Lemmy user fantasy that will confuse future alien archaeologists the most. Thanks for sharing!

    • AItoothbrush
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      510 months ago

      My sister installed mint on my grandma’s laptop but she would ask us if she needed help.

  • @[email protected]
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    3110 months ago

    That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone’s time with this kind of question. Plus: “we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!”

    • Rob Bos
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      1410 months ago

      That doesn’t sound like Torvalds at all. The guy doesn’t suffer fools, but he doesn’t just pop off at people randomly. All accounts are that he’s a pretty chill dude.

    • @[email protected]
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      1110 months ago

      That really does not sound like Linus to me. The guy can be quite blunt and will gladly reach for swear words in his e-mails. But he can just as well be accommodating. I imagine, he’d be delighted that an old lady is running his software.

  • @[email protected]
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    2510 months ago

    Is this satire? Forgive me, but 99.999% of the population has no idea what a kernel is. Also, since when would a mouse care about your kernel version? Puzzling post.

    • @[email protected]
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      2610 months ago

      I’m imagining, it said on the packaging of the mouse that it needed that kernel version.

      In Linux, the kernel delivers most drivers, so it may not yet have had the appropriate mouse driver in kernel versions before that.

      • @[email protected]
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        910 months ago

        Maybe this is possible, but typically you’re lucky to even find Linux support mentioned at all.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          Kind of surprisingly, but kind of not, I’ve often seen it mentioned for such rather basic hardware.

          Thing is:

          • The chip manufacturer sells in extremely high quantities (to many mouse manufacturers).
          • They probably hardly have to do anything for Linux support, because it’s such basic hardware. Write a driver once and slightly maintain it over the decades.
          • Aside from low cost, their only real sales argument is reaching a bigger market with their chips, and the Raspi crowd + deals with organizations running exclusively Linux, isn’t that irrelevant either.
  • TimeSquirrel
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    1910 months ago

    What grocery store and where? I set up Linux Mint for my Mom. She’s 67.

      • TimeSquirrel
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        2310 months ago

        BRB, gotta make some phone calls, Mom’s lost in Finland apparently.

      • @[email protected]
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        810 months ago

        More Finns should be using Linux, specially considering its Finnish origins.

        Also, hello from the other side of Östersjön 👋

        • @ladyanita22
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          310 months ago

          I mean, Linux is not American than Finnish at this point.

          But yeah, it still was born in Finland :)

  • YⓄ乙
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    1010 months ago

    I work in IT and my hate for baby boomers is real but after reading this I am less hateful. Thanks

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    I worked retail in electronics for quite a while and all the linux people I encountered were turbonerds for the most part. Thankfully I think that is changing. I imagine this lady had one of her family members set her up of course.