Apparently my love language is installing @linux on the laptops of people I really care about.
So far I’ve switched 4 people to Linux (with approval and interest obviously, plus unlimited tech support lol). 3 are happier with it than Windows and the other liked Linux but had to switch back to Windows due to some audio production software they needed.
It’s also secretly been an experiment to see what distro is the most user friendly. I have one on Linux Mint, one on Debian, and the other on Fedora Silverblue. All three have been great, but I think the winner is Silverblue so far. I don’t love how quick Silverblue versions become EoL, but it’s also the distro with the easiest updater. It’s an Apple level of simplicity; click update, restart at some point, done. No scary package lists or changelogs, just a nice blue button to press.
Also Flatpak + Flathub continues to be a huge contributor in making Linux friendly to normal people, in my opinion.
Id really love to get my mom on Silverblue but she refuses to use Libreoffice.
Office 2023 is a little jank in WINE unfortunately 😞
She’d be such an easy candidate otherwise, she only needs office, email, and Internet and loves the Thinkpad I gave her.
I’ve got ZorinOS 17 running on a laptop I share with my partner. Her initial reaction was “what is this?” but now that she’s used to it, she’s been happy.
Silverblue looks quite interesting, I might give it a go in a VM. As long as it kinda looks like Windows it shouldn’t be too hard of a transition
What about onlyoffice? The UI is a lot more modern which is probably the issue right?
The issue I’ve run into is primarily compatibility with existing documents and being able to share it with other in industry. Like it or not, for business in the US, the office suite is pretty much the only document & spreadsheet application you can expect everyone to have.
It’s not fair to ask people who aren’t interested in learning linux to deal with the incompatibilities between Libre/Open office and O365 because “I don’t like Microsoft”. If they’re pushing to move away from MS and understand this, I’d still probably recommend LibreOffice over OpenOffice because moving someone from a well maintained industry standard Microsoft product to a less supported and less compatible Oracle app seems irresponsible.
Edit: The whole second paragraph is about OpenOffice and not OnlyOffice. Please disregard
I am fascinated by your user friendliness experiment and I often daydream about conducting one myself. I would be interested in reading a more detailed write-up of the advantages and disadvantages of each option.
For Debian, did you consider setting up unattended upgrades?
Would you consider adding an RHEL/CentOS derivative such as AlmaLinux to the mix? The current version of AlmaLinux is supposed to be supported until 2032. The EPEL repository brings the software selection a little bit closer to Fedora.
