Will be brief, her laptop is EOL with windows 10 being discontinued. I have an old laptop laying around that I could repurpose for her. If I reimage with Windows 11 she would be familiar and her son who lives nearby could give her assistance from time to time but I have to install by creating a custom image via Rufus as the hardware of my laptop is not supposed to run Win11. If one day Micro$oft decides to drop unsupported devices she will be back with an unusable computer.
I could install Mint and she will likely be ok but I will be in charge of IT support if something goes sideways. She only needs OnlyOffice and an app to read and edit pdfs.
The reason I am posting here is to ask: how often did you had to help a family member with Mint? On my computers I never had issues as it pretty much is set and forget but I am far from the standard user. Can you share something that happened with you?
If I manage to get her on Mint she will pretty much be able to use that laptop up until the moment the machine will stop working or if she decides to get a new one. With windows she will be able to use it up until the vendor will decide otherwise.
And, last one, assuming I set Mint for her and considering I want to have near 0 chances to be called for issues, shall I go for LMDE or the standard edition?
Going to work now but will respond once I get back home
All my family members either use Mint or Elementary. I have never needed to go help them with anything.
It also really depends on what they use the PC for. Most people just need a browser and maybe an office suite. That’s it.
There’s so little they can fuck up on Linux, contra Windows.
I can remember how Windows always ended up getting filled up with a bunch of shit installed and what not. Not on Linux. It is literally as clean as the day I installed it, except for the desktop that’s filled up with documents haha
Yeah I know… I have skipped Mint this time and got her on Windows so her son that lives next door can help her out. Next upgrade cycle I might think of something
I switched my mother’s laptop from Windows to Linux Mint (Cinnamon). I put all the shortcuts in the same place, and made sure the bookmarks were identical. She barely noticed the difference.
I need to help about once per month when the laptop shows an “error” message, but it’s rarely anything difficult to resolve. Often just “save as docx or odt?” or “updates complete, please restart”.
I personally believe that switching to Windows 11 will be more difficult for her to learn than switching to Linux Mint. I do recommend setting up Timeshift and automatic updates.
That is the kinda things you can do when you can be with the person when you do the switch. I need to set it up on my own and ship it to her
This is a good post as more and more many of are planning for non linux users. My suggestion. Do the most vanilla thing. The boon and curse of linux is the number of choices. Make the simplest choice for them and yourself.
I prefer the Mint MATE distro, but that’s more or less just a matter of preference.
I’d say boot Mint up to a live boot, get WiFi connected (the most recent versions of Mint thankfully have more built in WiFi drivers than older versions), maybe install a couple programs she might like/need to use, and let her test it out as a live boot for a while before making a committed decision.
I wish I could do that… I need to set the computer us and ship it to her… if I was around I could take the laptop for a spin
I recommend installing something like rust desk. It will allow you to easily provide remote support.
Hmm, that is a conundrum indeed.
I’m not home right now and haven’t tested this myself, but apparently there’s a website where you can test different Linux distros right within your web browser…
https://distrosea.com/select/linuxmint/
I’ll definitely be checking that out later myself, seems like a really good way to help people get the feel for Linux before jumping in…
I never understand how people say computers don’t support win 11. I’ve installed it on over a decade old PC. I’ve never not been able to install it. What’s up with that?
Nothing can addire you that micro$oft will not make that totally impossible in a future release
The Athlon 64 X2 CPU doesn’t even support Windows 10, where you been homie?
Adding a VNC server and a Zerotier private VPN allows you to quickly provide support remotely. I support 8 different computers this way from hundreds of miles.
