I’m visiting my parents for the holidays and convinced them to let me switch them to Linux.
They use their computer for the typical basic stuff; email, YouTube, Word, Facebook, and occasionally printing/scanning.
I promised my mom that everything would look the same and work the same. I used Linux Mint and customized the theme to look like Windows 10. I even replaced the Mint “Start” button with the Windows logo.
So far they like it and everything runs great. Plus it’s snappier now that Windows isn’t hogging all the system resources.
I did the same thing with my Dad. He’s been using Linux Mint for a bit over 2 years now.
Linux Mint is more than enough for his usage: Email, internet browsing and word processing.
set up some remote desktop in case you need to support them when your vacation ends
Already threw RustDesk on there and tested it.
I did that about 10 years ago because I got tired of removing malware for them. They haven’t had any malware since then.
Same here. Not just my parents, but also some of my aunts and uncles. None of them are particularly tech savvy and none of them have had any major issues.
People who claim that Linux is difficult to use, or not suitable for newbies, have no idea what they’re talking about.
Linux just needs to come preinstalled.
People, stop buying windows stuff and then installing linux! Buy Linux: https://linuxpreloaded.com/
I gave my mom a macbook with debian KDE and a mac OS theme… I dont think she’s noticed yet…
It’s so funny that having a different theme makes the computer hard to use for some parents. :)
Those people drive cars on the road!
Good job on that! Linux is way better for average uses like you described. 😊
An excellent choice to use Linux Mint! If my parents allowed me to switch their computers to Linux, I would’ve chosen Linux Mint as well for them. But, I probably wouldn’t give them the Windows 10 look.
Master…please teach me your ways.
Just uninstall your proprietary parent and install Linux.
Not worth it. You will end up playing the h support when something goes wrong.
I set up Mint on my parent’s PC a couple of years ago, and the amount of support I have had to provide has dropped to basically zero.
As if I’m not already doing that. Why do you think I was home working on my parent’s computer in the first place?
Plus with how shitty Windows is getting, I’ll likely be doing less tech support going forward.
Typically all of us who switched our relatives to Linux were doing support anyway — but it’s much easier than Windows.
Windows needs constant handholding like a needy pet (and not the cute kind). With Linux I spend extended periods of time without having to do anything. I get like one major issue a year, and it’s usually hardware related. The only questions I get occasionally are “do you know an app that does thing”.
My parents would ask me for tech support anyway no matter the OS. I have them update software and update Firefox and Chromium and their Netflixing will keep working, been very low stress generally.
Make me use windows and I will write a similar blog post about me hating every second of it. But I don’t have to, so I won’t.
The part about dragging and dropping files like its the 90s, instead of just pushing to your git repo was funny.
Cmon, this isn’t a compatible and good enough alternative:
It is something that will just give you issues down the line when people expect documents to look consistent.
Firstly, there’s no guarantee that a document would look exactly the same even within different versions of MS Office itself. Also, try opening any complex document in MS Office on macOS for instance, and you’ll most likely notice issues or differences compared to the Windows version. In my old sysadmin job, where I used a Mac, we had a standard “change control” template that we had to fill out when doing infrastructure changes, and the radio buttons used in the form didn’t work on the macOS version of Office. So issues like this are pretty common. These sort of issues are why people either normally ignore them OR in the case that layout/formatting is critical (eg: for publishing/printing), then they’d use PDF or TeX or similar formats, where the formatting is preserved.
Secondly, as @[email protected] mentioned, use OnlyOffice if MSO compatibility is important. Below is a screenshot I captured of a recreated Lorem Ipsum docx on my Linux machine, with MS Office Online (running on Edge) on the left and OnlyOffice on the right.
As you can see, they’re virtually identical - and any difference in the sizing etc would come down to the fact that I’m running the web version of MSO, so the zoom/scaling may not exactly match that of OO. But other than that, if you check the spacing and everything else, it’s pretty accurate.
Finally, in saying that, even OO has it’s limitations and isn’t a 100% replacement for MSO - as it can’t run macros, or may not be able to display certain types of embedded objects in Excel and so on. But then, even the web and Mac versions of MS Office has these sort of limitations. But the average home user wouldn’t normally use macros or advanced features in Office, so for the most part, OO, or even LO should be fine for most users.
Also, just as a reminder, in this thread we’re discussing about how Linux can work fine for most home users, the kind of users who have simple requirements, and aren’t dependent on specific proprietary programs like Photoshop etc. Obviously Linux will not be suitable for every single need or use case out there, but neither is Windows or MacOS - if you have special needs or requirements, then use the tool that’s best for the job. But nitpicking minor differences like this isn’t helping anyone, we’d be sitting here arguing all day about how “X OS sucks because it can’t do Y”, which is a pointless exercise.
Edit: I was curious to see how bad LibreOffice actually was so I just tested it out:
… and that was surprisingly not bad at all! Just one word out of place. But this goes to show how opensource software is ever evolving and constantly improving - so a particular criticisms you may have had in the past may no longer be applicable, unless you test it out yourself against the latest versions.
On my print with version 7.6 it wasn’t just a word out of place. I noticed you’re opening a DOCX and even if it looks better than what I showed it is useless. LibreOffice refuses to save in DOCX meaning I can’t edit documents.
Not improving at all, you just did the wrong test :P
Um… that’s NOT a refusal, it’s just a warning. Clicking on that highlighted button will save the DOCX.
To not get the warning again, all you have to do is untick the checkbox which says “ask when not saving on ODF” - it’s there right in your screenshot.
This article seems misguided, people pick their OS because of what they need. I can list many things with subpar experience on Windows: emacs suck; latex is slow; libreoffice and thunderbird crashes like nobody’s bushiness; opam is straightup unsupported (which means ocaml, dune, coq is a pain); there is absolutely nothing in the app store, means that people will need to resort to commandline tools to install and update app.
All of this obviously will not decrown Windows from a OS with mass appeal. Since the software most people need runs well on windows.
Another example, in my crowd it is quite rude to send a docx file between people assuming people want to use or have access to Microsoft office, so everything is in PDF. Yet in many other crowd docx is the default. We were never bounded by the need of a specific office software, while others do not enjoy the same luxury.
There is needs by different groups of people, and that means they choose the OS that is most comfortable for them. Linux is not going to have 70% desktop adoption rate overnight, and no one is saying that. In fact both the quote in the article and this post explicitly dismissed “linux is ready for everyone” delusion. They are just comfortable in Linux, and what is wrong with that?
In 99% of cases I have seen, people pick their OS because it came preinstalled
