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68 points

The vast majority of people have no experience installing an OS and likely never will.

The typical user uses whatever is preinstalled when the get the hardware.

My father-in-law wrecked his windows pc with malware over and over so I bought him a Wow PC https://www.mywowcomputer.com/ and he loves it. I don’t think he has any idea its running linux.

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4 points

Honestly I think the bigger barrier is the BIOS. The button to get to the boot menu is different on every motherboard.

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4 points

My brother in Christ, do you think an average person knows what BIOS/boot menu are?

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4 points

They don’t even know what an operating system is

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1 point

That’s what I’m saying. The OS installer can be super nice and intuitive, but the process of getting to that point, messing with the BIOS, is troublesome.

I know in the past there’s been tools that allowed you to install Linux from within Windows. That would be a great way to work around this problem, though I think there are certain limitations with that approach.

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2 points

formerly firstSTREET® - for Boomers and Beyond®, Inc

Lmao

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2 points
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i sure hope they aren’t still the same specs (ancient celeron 2gb/32gb flash) for $1100+. but kinda suspect they might be.

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18 points
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How do updates work with WOW computers? Or does the software just never get updated? Or do you just update the computer for him every now and then? What distro is this using underneath?

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18 points

The updates are automatic. They seem to have rolled their own desktop environment. Not sure which distro. The main selling point was that I don’t need to maintain it for him. I am registered as his “tech buddy” so they contact me if something needs to be done hands on. In 3 years no issues/calls so far.

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12 points

Yeah, I was just thinking this needs a lot more upfront info. I mean, kudos for the site that harkens back to the 90’s infomercial era and keeping it comfortable for those generations, but a page with some specs and actual info would go nicely with that.

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12 points
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From the website landing page :

New programs and updates are provided automatically for the life of your WOW! Computer.

From https://www.mywowcomputer.com/open-source/

Distro is based on tiny core

The source files can be found by following 3 links deep to https://www.telikin.com/source/ doesn’t look like they include their frontend though, which might be proprietary, idk.

(you lazy bastard /j)

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7 points

Lol only $1300

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