Linux and your family

I used to provide tech support for the family, and tried to move them to Linux to make them easier to support (similar simple use cases)

Thry weren't interested so now requests for help get a genuine "Sorry, I don't use Windows so I can't help"

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.

We used Linux a long time ago so it's not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the "penguin." That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It's very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I'm finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

My parents moved to Linux on their own accord: Dad just wanted something that stays the same, and doesn't try to exploit him, so he's been a happy Debian & XFCE user for about a decade now; Mom never used Windows, so she's happy with Debian & GNOME I was a Debian user (and developer) back when they switched to Linux, and Debian is where they stayed. Dad's in IT, so he can manage both systems fine, most of the time. I need to unfuck it from time to time, when Dad decides it is a good idea to try and install the latest LibreOffice Ubuntu arm64 .deb package on his x86_64 Debian oldstable, throwing whatever --force flags at dpkg he can find, but other than that, they have everything they need, are happy with their choices, and need very little support from me.

In my own household, Linux is the only system to begin with (apart from a handful of Android phones we all hate, and an XBox, which is slowly getting replaced by a Linux mini PC). I've been a Linux user since late 1996, and I purposefully only bought hardware that works decently with Linux, so setting up scanners, printers and the like are a breeze.

Wife saw my setup, how I operate it mostly with the keyboard (she hates the mouse more than I do!), wanted the same, so I built her something similar (NixOS + Wayland + niri + firefox + geary). She never had her own computer before, but did use Windows at work from time to time. She didn't want to use it on her laptop, though. She wanted something tailor built for her, for her very reluctant computer-usage. So Linux it is! She doesn't hate it, which is the best I can accomplish with anything computer-related when it comes to her. I'm maintaining her laptop, but that too, requires little work. I just update it from time to time. She's loving that she can send a print job from her laptop, from the living room, to the printer in my work room.

Kids played with both the xbox, and the gaming mini pc I built, and much prefer the latter, because it is easier to navigate, it is faster (using cheaper hardware), it is more stable, so when they're old enough to get their own computers, they want Linux too, and I shall abide. Luckily, while schools around here are rather windows-oriented, they have to accommodate Linux users too, so the kids will be more than fine with their Linux computers, even for school tasks. Whether they'll end up maintaining their computers or not remains to be seen. If they want to, I'll teach them how to.

My stepmoms aunt had a super slow laptop with Windows that I took and installed Linux Mint on and she is super happy with it. It's like a brand new computer for her!

She only uses her computer to pay bills and check Facebook and she haven't called me once to complain. She only tells me that it's working great.

I plan to install Linux Mint for my mom too in the future. I don't think my dad would be able to handle it tho. He barley know his way around the computer but he knows enough to do his work and I don't want to mess up his workflow.

I can't imagine switching everyone in my family to Linux. I think it'd be too much to support lol.

Both parents are on openSUSE KDE. They only use the web browser and printer, so it pretty much doesn't matter what UI they use, but it really helped with their acceptance that KDE not only works similar to Windows, it was a clear upgrade from Windows 7, with it looking more modern and being a lot faster.

I also like openSUSE for this, because YaST allows me to administer their PC without cracking out the terminal for everything. It just gives them at least a tiny bit of hope that they might be able to do this themselves. And my brother, who's not a Linux person, has managed to fix things via YaST without my help.

Ultimately, though, I use openSUSE KDE myself, and that's really important.
If my parents mildly complain about something, I can proactively offer to change that, because I know all the settings of KDE and YaST.
Or if I don't know whether there's a setting, I can go digging for it on my system.

But perhaps most importantly: "This Linux thing isn't working." – "Hmm, it's working on my system, so there's gotta be a way to fix it."
That immediately shuts down any negativity, so I can concentrate on fixing it, rather than deflecting their grumbling.

Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

Put it on my 10-year-old son's desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she's getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.

Kept my parents' desktop running for 14 years with Debian, XFCE, and the occasional hardware replacement. Maybe a bit of a PC of Theseus scenario but it worked pretty great.

Early this year, I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Linux Mint.

Very old, low power desktop, it was already running super slowly with Windows.

It's been great, the computer is much more responsive now, everything works just fine. Browser is the same, Spotify app from the store is great, printer/scanner, icons on the desktop, their ultrawide monitor, it all #justworks.

I also don't have to worry now about my dad clicking every weird and sketchy email link and ad.

Automatic updates are set up, and Timeshift snapshots are too, in case something breaks and needs rollback.

My SO runs Mint on one of her older laptops, and aside from an audio driver issue, I’ve had no problems maintaining it, and she finds it pretty user friendly.

Not successful. They don't even try to understand why I use a "non-standard" OS like a "unicorn" trying to be "unique," let alone try it.

My wife is still on Mac OSX, but my son has embraced Mint. I’m a bit cheesed off that there aren’t (obviously) many kid friendly programming tutorial resources, other than maybe getting a sub to codeacademy. Other than that, all good.

I don't think my kids have ever used a Windows machine. I have a couple of machines at home that both run Linux Mint and they use Chromebooks at school. There is not much software that they need that is not either a web page or also available natively.

Saved an old desktop and laptop from the trash by installing mint and Firefox with ublock. The desktop lasted them for years without any problems, and I think the only problem I supported on the laptop over years was the boot mount filled itself up during updates and needed to be cleaned up.

No point imo, the people who benefit significantly from using Linux are the people who understand what it is

I try to get my techy friends on Linux and much of my family are techies anyway but I wouldn't try to put someone who won't be able to fix it themselves on it because then they're stuck if I'm not around to fix it

My mom got my XPS9350 i used to bring to uni, and at the moment, it has Fedora in it.

She repeatedly claimed it was a lot more straightforward for her to understand, compared to the endless inconsistencies and issues on Windows. All things considered, she is fairly tech illiterate too.

Plus it’s easy for me to remote into, in case something breaks

I've been trying to convince my wife to dump Windows for years, and her question is always the same, "will I still have MS Outlook? No? Then I don't want it". Her Windows 10 computer is 9 years old, has never been re-installed and it's slower than a freaking tired snail...

Experience with relatives who had no prior experience with Windows or Linux: installing Linux for them was great, painless and also facilitates troubleshooting for me. No problems here. Mostly using Linux Mint for those purposes, it's a great distro for non-techy people.

Experience with relatives with prior Windows experience (but no Linux experience): a mixed bag. Some use Linux happily now (thankfully), some returned to Windows because they couldn't change their habits or have weird specific incompatibility issues with niche hardware which they also don't want to solve in a different way. I've kind of stopped giving support to those, since I don't want to give Windows support in my free time. I sometimes have to do it work-related, that's more than enough Windows contact for me. I also refuse to give buying advice on any products by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon or Google, with only very few exceptions (e.g. Pixel phones, because they're very secure and with GrapheneOS installed they're the best general mobile phone option). It's a bit of an ethical dilemma because I'd like to help the people but also don't want to directly or indirectly support those companies. I always offer them help if they use Linux or the things I recommend.

My kids only knew Linux from the first day they used a computer.

They didn't have any difficulty transitioning between that at home and the chromebooks or windows desktops the school had.

My wifes old laptop died and I got an ancient gaming laptop from a colleague and put Linux Mint on it. It works great.

She uses it for studying and some light gaming (Stardew Valley). It just works. She never used Linux before but had zero issues using it and she even said its just like Windows, just faster.

Switched my parents from an iMac to an old Dell Optiplex running Elementary OS. It worked pretty well but there were some glitches with Pantheon DE and OS version upgrades required a reinstall, so I switched them to Fedora after a couple years. It's easier for me to support because I run Fedora on my laptop. Everyone's happy now. There is always some amount of tech support to do but lately it has been very low. I even helped my dad upgrade the RAM over the phone once, that was fun.

Other than printing, it goes well because they know if they were on Windows or Mac, I'll have nothing to do with it.

Change is always hard, be it Windows 7 to Windows 10 or 11. The German company Tuxedo Computers has pretty nice Linux laptops for beginners and professionals, this is what made the change easier for my parents: http://tuxedocomputers.com/ They even offer RTX 4090 custom laptop builds, but for the screens they still have no OLED option when I looked the last time.

My niece, my mom, and my cousin are using Linux because I gave them my old laptops with Debian in it. They don't know how to do anything with the system (not even update it, I do it for them), but they know how to use a browser, or launch a game. Works fine for them like that.

For me the most important thing was to use Threema/Signal instead of Whatsapp in the family groups so I’m trying not to pressure everyone to jump on the Linux boat.

I converted my fiancé’s MacBook Pro to Linux, but she’s always using her company Thinkpad which has to be on Windows.

My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it's enough for their use. They're both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!

I needed to update my parents old NUC from Win7, it was either new hardware to run Win10 or give Linux a try, I told them I had been running Linux since 09 full time and it isn't any harder than running Windows.

I said how about you give it a go for a month or so and see how you go.

I installed Mint, it has been a few years now and no real issues beyond taking a while to get the printer working. I installed rust desk for remote assistance which I have only used 3 times since install.

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister's car. She's adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

I've been running Linux on my laptop for a few years now (started with Mint, on Manjaro now). I have our HTPC set up with Mint, and the family is good with it. When my kids are old enough for their own, I'll probably keep them going with Mint as well, we'll see.

My wife's laptop still has Windows, but I'll likely move her over if she gets a new PC at some point.

I moved my elderly mother to ChromeOS and I no longer have to deal with the IT burden of supporting whatever she installed or broke this week. Move your parents to Linux if you truly enjoy being an on call unpaid helpdesk

I set up Lubuntu for my mom on an old laptop because it couldn't handle mint. She liked that it felt new and familiar enough, but she didn't love it enough to not go back to Windows when she got newer more powerful laptop.

Moved my sister to Ubuntu a while ago aside from the occasional support call everything works quite well.

As for my mom, I sat her down way back and told her she needed to move off of Windows XP (support was running out). I explained to her that she could learn Windows 7 and eventually 10 (8 was already a known dud by then) or she could switch to a "Traditional" desktop paradigm that resembled XP closely where she'd only had to relearn once and then keep running it forever, so I moved her to MATE.

While most issues she had with incompatibilities could be solved (and often remotely by me just via ssh) there was one MFP that just wouldn't scan properly (I've scoured the web for guides and sane drivers etc.) in the end I set up a Dual boot Windows (with a nice "switch to Windows " script right in the pinned apps) just so she could scan from there (scans automatically saved on a NAS share that was also available in Linux so she could use the scanned documents there). These days the MFP died and she got a new one that will actually scan in Linux but I kept the dual boot just in case (though I doubt she ever uses it).

Replaced on old windows install on living room media pc with popOS. Newer hardware, just didn’t make sense to run such a vulnerable and outdated os any more and I wasn’t about to pay for a new windows version for it. A few choice apps linked in the dock, and the main streaming websites bookmarked on homepage in the browser, and we are golden. No issues making the switch really, apart from occasional Bluetooth hiccups with the combo wireless keyboard/trackpad that drives everything. To be fair, Bluetooth occasionally has a meltdown on windows or Mac as well, so I don’t think this detracts from a successful conversion. The end result is actually much more stable and approachable for the whole fam, so quite happy with results.

I haven't tried yet with my grandparents, but I will next time I see them. I have tried with my dad but he wasn't much of a fan of it and preferred MacOS. My mom uses a chromebook and it suits her well enough, so I won't try to budge her.