Linux for the confused

ProphetOfDoom

ProphetOfDoom

My sister's husband who is 73 and not confident with computers has just given me a Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 on it to "fix". The last person who "helped" him with it has locked him out of the system without a password. It already has at least one virus. I'm strongly inclined to install Fedora on it for him. He has said the main things he wants to do are Facebook and eBay so it is very much an "OS as a means to run a browser" situation. I am not one of those people who gets grandma to run Linux just so I can feel smug about it though. I actually need it to work for him. Has anyone any experience of getting a confused relative to use a free OS? Am I being foolhardy? Any other thoughts? Thanks.
 
I once entered a book store which had a few computers which you could access to visit their website to order books online. It ran Ubuntu. That was many years ago. The target audience of the book store were mothers and grand parents mostly. If such a store runs Ubuntu on its customer-facing computers to browser the web, I'm sure it's still a viable option.

I suggest you give it a try. Itself Ubuntu, Fedora... on it, guide him around a bit so he'll know how to start FB, his email program (Outlook or gmail) and the like. It's all browser based so it should not be too hard.
 
Mint is another popular one for the inexperienced, aside from the two mentioned above. Fedora does sometimes become a test bed for RedHat so things can get broken.
 
Thanks for your thoughts. That's really interesting about the bookstore and quite encouraging really. I only mentioned Fedora because I already have it on a USB stick; you're right that Mint would probably be a better fit. Unfortunately my only internet access at the moment is via a phone and they throttle me if I try to download more than 1GB of anything in one day. I'll see if I can recover Windows somehow so there's a way back - hopefully there's a recovery partition - then ask my brother-in-law to okay Linux so it's his fault not mine HAHA. Hmm.
 
I notice that for consumers / less technical users that Linux distros tend to rot for them. For example Fedora 29(?) in just a year will be pretty abandoned.
If he is not a technical user, he really shouldn't be running an abandoned OS.

Normally that is not really an issue but I notice Web Browsers (Chromium, Firefox) he will need to keep current to use basic things like online videos, online banking, facebook etc (perhaps all he uses a computer for).

I recommend use a very boring enterprise OS like Red Hat Enterprise and clones (CentOS, OL). For example RHEL6 running the very user friendly Gnome 2 still has access to Firefox 60+ and Chromium 72. These were specially built for this distro because it does not provide Gtk+3 natively. Because the distros are typically paid for, they have the money and employees to do so.

If it is recent hardware, then Centos 7 will ensure it will keep working with a recent web browser for 10+ years :)
 
My father (70) uses FreeBSD. I maintain it. I have a lot less work/trouble than if I were to maintain a Windows computer.
So yeah, it is possible to run something Linux-like for people who aren't tech savvy at all.
Then again, I use FreeBSD as desktop myself so it's not like I have to do a lot of extra work. I have packages, config files, scripts etc.

And I use ZFS with snapshots on that system so if he deletes anything that he wanted to keep, I can probably restore it.
If I break something while upgrading packages or even the OS, I can just revert with a simple zfs command. Works like a charm.
 
If available, a Puppy Linux Live CD/DVD works well. HDD for storage of data, fixed/constant OS on read only medium so if 'things go wrong' just reboot to the exact same working system again. Tweak the desktop before burning so its just a few desktop icons or menu entries (boot, single click firefox desktop icon ... )
 
AlexanderProphet said:
My sister's husband who is 73 and not confident with computers has just given me a Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 on it to "fix". The last person who "helped" him with it has locked him out of the system without a password. It already has at least one virus. I'm strongly inclined to install Fedora on it for him. He has said the main things he wants to do are Facebook and eBay so it is very much an "OS as a means to run a browser" situation. I am not one of those people who gets grandma to run Linux just so I can feel smug about it though. I actually need it to work for him. Has anyone any experience of getting a confused relative to use a free OS? Am I being foolhardy? Any other thoughts? Thanks.
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I already done it before. Recommend you have a look at Q4OS TDE edition and XPQ4 theme set to emulate Windows 10. With the net and Google, everything will be very easy to do.

If his lap is more powerful have a look at ZorinOS. If it is mid weight see Linux Lite. There're a bunch of distro for Windows migration out there but I found they either include coin miner, trash apps or poor quality themed crap.

Even our Ghostbsd and NomadBsd could be used for this purpose if it ever run on the lap. I recommend Ghostbsd. Send the ff icon to desktop and double click. It's all.
 
Would it be an option to replace the whole hardware with either a currently supported Apple tablet (where OS upgrades etc. are just automatic), or with a Chromebook (which has no OS, so many questions like OS maintenance and upgrades don't even come up)? I use both, and am very happy with them. I presume an Android tablet would work too, but I've never used one, so I don't know whether they're user friendly.
 
I've actually been trying various distros and even FreeBSD for the same reason of the OP. My grandparents computer runs Windows 7 and mine as well, and of course Windows 7 support will be over with Jan 2020. And I'd rather not update the computers to Windows 10 or shell out 105.00 for a Windows 10 OEM disc. Hence trying out various "grandparent friendly" distro or BSD that could /would easily replace Winblows 7... I'm still pissing around with different ones Lol.
 
AlexanderProphet said:
My sister's husband who is 73 and not confident with computers has just given me a Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 on it to "fix". The last person who "helped" him with it has locked him out of the system without a password. It already has at least one virus. I'm strongly inclined to install Fedora on it for him. He has said the main things he wants to do are Facebook and eBay so it is very much an "OS as a means to run a browser" situation. I am not one of those people who gets grandma to run Linux just so I can feel smug about it though. I actually need it to work for him. Has anyone any experience of getting a confused relative to use a free OS? Am I being foolhardy? Any other thoughts? Thanks.
Click to expand...
My wife uses happily Arch for almost 4 years now and never complained. Mostly for web based stuff and some simple office documents. She has absolutely no idea of OS-es, networks and administration, but that's actually a good thing. This means the user does not need any admin rights and they'll just start up the web browser or LibreOffice and save their documents in ~/Documents. Printing should also never be an issue, just make sure CUPS is started automatically at boot.

And updates... yeah, you'll probably have to do that for them. I don't know how Fedora handles updates, but in Arch you basically have to type "pacman -Syu" in the console and it does it for you. Mostly successfully, but at very rare occasions an X bug or something might prevent X from starting and they need to have you repair that.

It's quite easy to make a ponty-clicky shortcut to a bash script that does the update automatically and teach them how to update themselves once a month.

As far as stability goes - WOW! My wife used Windows before and it was horrible. It would get slower and slower over time and filled up with junk. Since she started using Arch, it's always fast and works quite well. She even gets angry when I start updating it - "what for?" she asks, "it works quite well anyway."

So having a grandma run GNU Linux makes a lot of sense for me. Very much more than any other case. You'll lock in a safe and stable environment, once you configure it it will just run and stay fast. And they'll use the browser to access everything they need anyway.
If you install steam they can even play some games on it.

The same applies to FreeBSD, by the way. Once it runs, it runs.
 
Oh and by the way, I did not mention why I like Arch especially for those users.
I ran Ubuntu a long time ago and it worked for a while but then when it's time to upgrade to a new version it's a disaster. It would force you to upgrade after a certain date, when your version runs out of support. Then you do the upgrade and it breaks a thousand things at a time. Then you spend a few days trying to fix what it broke and at the end of the day you just say "f**** it, I'll just make a new installation and copy my documents over".
That's BAD!
Since I started running a rolling release (Arch), I have not reinstalled my system even once. I am still working off of this initial installation I did back then. It's amazing.
So whatever distro you choose, either make sure your users don't mind a complete reinstallation if an upgrade does not work out, or simply choose a rolling release.

What I would not recommend for a grandma would be installing Gentoo. Yeah, that's for people who like to patch things, especially in the kernel. It's for power users.
My favorite choice would be Arch, or why not FreeBSD? Just make sure all the hardware is supported well and you can automate the update process somehow or do it for your users once a month.
 
Not only for grandparents, also for childs. I visit my nieces and nephews once or twice a year, and they always ask me for help with there computer problems. I often see windows full of virus, malware, adware, scareware crap. The oldest one asked me for an alternative to windows, and I installed Linux Mint. I also told him something about linux, how to do this and that.
Next visit I ask him (while fixing his siblings PC's): "And yours?"
Answer: "No, everything is working well."
And the younger brother ask me to install linux on his brand new machine too...
 
Sure, for small kids - definitely. That's also my experience. But when they get older (12+) they'll probably be needing admin access slowly and start breaking things. But that's good for them.
 
Along with Jupiter Broadcasting's BSDNow podcast, I also listen to their Linux Unplugged show. Over the past few months they've been praising Ubuntu for it's "hands off" approach to maintenance. It seems that updates are mostly scheduled to happen similarly to how Windows and macOS schedule updates (though crucially it's been noted that it doesn't do the forced shutdown that Windows does).

Unless you are easily on hand, I'd stay away from rolling releases and "boutique" distros and go for something well know that is easy to maintain from afar (i.e. massive support base which makes common problems easy to Google for and fix over the phone).
 
I agree with forquare. If you do a rolling release, you should be able to help if problems happen. And from my experience with Arch, it happens from time to time, but not too often. With my own machine I have had about 2 hickups so far, where I needed to patch things up. Once the NVIDIA graphic driver ran out of support so they messed up the packages and GDM stopped working properly. I actually switched to KDE because it was the last straw, they totally broke Gnome over time.
The other occasion was where something with Thunderbird and GnuPG messed up and Thunderbird would not recognize the keys in the keystore properly.

Apart from that, the experience has been quite enjoyable. But you need to be around, should things go wrong.

I am not aware how well Ubuntu handles such issues. My experience was that these would inevitably happen, but instead of gradually bumping into the issues one at a time, you get them all at once when you do an upgrade.
I have to say, my upgrade experience with FreeBSD has been much more pleasant than Ubuntu.

What Ubuntu does really well in my opinion is offering a pointy-clicky installer which is very nice for non-experts in GNU Linux.

It's default desktop is horrible though. I would install something sensible - KDE, Xfce or something else not from canonical.

P.S. And since I started using ZFS things change for the better. Now I snapshot things regularly and if something goes wrong and I can't fix it easily, I rollback. That could come quite handy if things go awry.
 
Hi, thanks for all your replies.
They were very interesting to read.
It was lucky that I held off from installing Fedora for a bit, because requirements have changed; my brother-in-law just told me on the phone that he wants to use a not-particularly-standard piece of hardware with his laptop. It's an OKI printer designed to print labels for businesses (he grows flowers for a living). I've always found Linux printing to be a bit flaky even with consumer hardware. And he'll probably want a nice friendly GUI from which to print. For these reasons I'm reluctantly sticking to Windows for the time being.
So anyway, I couldn't brute force his password as one person suggested because the NTFS partition was hibernated and refused to mount. I found out the laptop has a little pinhole and you can shove a bent paperclip in it to do a factory reset. So I did that. Windows is now working again. It's almost a decent low end machine - 4GB of RAM, 64GB SSD - it's only let down by the Celeron processor.
I'm still keeping Linux as a last resort option if it gets too sluggish but it's usable at the moment.
I just hope there are Windows 10 drivers for his printer - he bought it ten years ago.
Thanks again.
 
AlexanderProphet said:
....
(he grows flowers for a living)......
Click to expand...

This machine was specially developed for flower growers :

6371
 

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FreeBSD on an old Asus laptop did the job for my father, also in his eighties, for three to four years. When that died, maybe six months ago or so, I passed on an old Acer laptop of mine running OpenBSD.

With either, he can browse the web, go onto youtube, etc - so not found the pressing need to mess about installing any Linux. In that time and now on laptop number two, he has had to call me about maybe two or three times in total... all turned out to be hardware related or user error.
 
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