Apparently my love language is installing @linux on the laptops of people I really care about.
It really depends on who is being helped and the motive for you “helping” them. I’ve had both really good and pretty bad experiences helping and trying to help people with various computer things. As with providing any kind of support, it’s important to get out of your own head and understand what the person your helping wants and needs
As with providing any kind of support, it’s important to get out of your own head and understand what the person your helping wants and needs
Yes because someone that uses MS Word 6-8 hours a day certainly doesn’t want to use Linux and have compatibility issues while sharing documents with others who do the same.
Both of my parents heavily use O365 and I have to fight the urge to suggest linux every time they complain about automatic updates or weird microsoft integrations.
Part of me really wants to try Fedora or Mint for them instead of the incoming windows 11 update, but it’s such a bad fit
I used to think that helping my other dumb grad mates with installing Linux made me look cool and I would be accepted. On the contrary, I looked like an idiot, now that I think of it. i became that weirdo support tech kid for the idiot professors, who could not tell the difference between Java and Javascript.
I guess the worst part is that people will eventually take advantage of you… and demand for more and more hours of your free support, hold whatever you installed against you like “after you did X… Y stopped working” etc. At the end of the day if you’re proving free support it must be easy, quick why wouldn’t they ask for more.
In their heads your efforts / help doesn’t provide any value and if by any chance one day they are in a situation where you could bill them or someone for tech support they would rather call any other random tech support guy or company instead of calling you - after all they’re looking for a “professional” now :)
oh that’s bad😿😿 yeah that would be a toxic way to look for approval alright ahahah
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.
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’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
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.
Please don’t force Linux onto people, it’ll only make them hate it.
I’ve installed Linux on my old family PC. It’s been two years and they haven’t noticed.
@isVeryLoud
dw consent comes first🥵🥵 their machine, their choice (until the manufacturer has their saying, that is)
Yes that way they’re trapped and need you for tech support, classic move.
These days installing Linux and upgrading it is easier than it was years ago. Installing Linux can be a good deed indeed :)
