5 ms·

My father was willing to switch, my mother was not. So: my father is now on his third Linux machine in 16 years (two laptops and now a NUC hiding behind a 24"

by dsr_ 8y ago

My father was willing to switch, my mother was not. So: my father is now on his third Linux machine in 16 years (two laptops and now a NUC hiding behind a 24" monitor). Normal updates are handled automatically; I do a major upgrade once a year. rsnapshot backs up to an external disk three times a day. Every so often he tells me that he wants to do something new, and asks if it's possible; the answer is always yes. My mother is on her fifth computer in that time. She's always unhappy with it, but refuses to change, because she's afraid that Linux will be incompatible with the new service-du-jour that her friends are always adopting.

gotorazor 8y ago
That’s the biggest problem I see to Linux adoption in these scenarios. Unless it is something super geeky, nobody makes client softwares for desktop Linux.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  The web is currently the most popular client.
- brightball 8y ago
  This has actually been one of the big perks of Electron.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I think you mean the Web.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  From that perspective, the problem isn't so much the proliferation of service providers but rather the proliferation of aggressively proprietary protocols. By that I mean services that don't merely fail to document and stabilize their protocols, but actively attack and undermine third-party clients. Some of them outright ban third-party clients in their ToS, some theoretically allow third-party clients but impose API limits that are unusable at scale, and some deliberately make API/protocol changes to break clients created via reverse engineering. Anything short of that gets some kind of native Linux client if it gets popular. That stance, in turn, is driven by business considerations that would probably be a huge tangent to discuss here. But it's important to keep in mind that this isn't just how things have always been; it's a relatively new trend, and trends can reverse.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  What software? For the vast majority of people, a browser is enough. Hell, I'm computer literate, can code in many languages and am very comfortable with Linux, but 100% of what I need to do I can do from a browser. Taxes, documents, spreadsheets, Netflix and other media, everything is accessible from a browser.
cookiecaper 8y ago
Similar situation here -- my mom uses Linux and my dad insists on Windows (to be fair, he has tried Linux here and there). My mom's computer has been trucking for over 10 years and after initial setup, she has rarely had issues. My dad has been through 4 different systems in the same amount of time and each one ends up riddled with malware and nigh unusable before he decides he just needs to upgrade again. In my dad's case, major barriers to adoption are a) EVER rendering an MS Office document noticeably incorrectly, on either end; b) DRM'd video components like Comcast's Xfinity streaming services; c) a feeling that he doesn't really have control over it and can't just search for any software he wants and be able to use it, or can't Google a concern and find reasonably-basic instructions to get something to happen. Those are all fairly legitimate concerns, I guess I'm just bothered by the way he treats all of these as direct failures of the OS rather than applying a little more flexibility -- if not to his computing habits in general, at least to his interpretation of the situation.
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  If switching OS creates those problems, it's entirely reasonable to blame the OS. An attitude of "switch to Linux and if you can't do anything that you used to do then it's something else's fault" while possibly fair is exceptionally unhelpful.
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    s/anything you used to/a small handful of specific things/ I'm not trying to say that this is a solution to the problems entailed, and I'm not even saying that he should be obliged to go through the inconvenience of using a different OS if it doesn't fulfill all of his needs. There's just an air around the tone that's frustrating. In general I would hope that performance, security, and system longevity would count for something, but I guess it's like telling someone to eat their vegetables. People are happier to just deal with a constant background malaise they can acclimate to and then ignore than they are to have the centralized in-the-moment friction of "to do thing X, switch to a separate VM/laptop/etc." And I mean, I get that. So the conclusion is probably that Linux is not stable enough for a potential user until there is very little risk that that user's inertia will ever be broken. This works pretty much fine for my mom since she just needs basic word processing, a scanner, and a web browser. Not as much for my dad.
bigbugbag 8y ago
You may be interested in looking into borg to replace rsnapshot. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://github.com/borgbackup/borg-import https://github.com/borgbackup/borg-import https://github.com/borgbackup/borgweb https://github.com/borgbackup/borgweb https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta
loosescrews 8y ago
Which distro are you using? I am particularly interested in the auto-install of normal updates.

by dsr_ 8y ago

gotorazor 8y ago

That’s the biggest problem I see to Linux adoption in these scenarios. Unless it is something super geeky, nobody makes client softwares for desktop Linux.

michaelmrose 8y ago
The web is currently the most popular client.
brightball 8y ago
This has actually been one of the big perks of Electron.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I think you mean the Web.
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
From that perspective, the problem isn't so much the proliferation of service providers but rather the proliferation of aggressively proprietary protocols. By that I mean services that don't merely fail to document and stabilize their protocols, but actively attack and undermine third-party clients. Some of them outright ban third-party clients in their ToS, some theoretically allow third-party clients but impose API limits that are unusable at scale, and some deliberately make API/protocol changes to break clients created via reverse engineering. Anything short of that gets some kind of native Linux client if it gets popular. That stance, in turn, is driven by business considerations that would probably be a huge tangent to discuss here. But it's important to keep in mind that this isn't just how things have always been; it's a relatively new trend, and trends can reverse.
Mikeb85 8y ago
What software? For the vast majority of people, a browser is enough. Hell, I'm computer literate, can code in many languages and am very comfortable with Linux, but 100% of what I need to do I can do from a browser. Taxes, documents, spreadsheets, Netflix and other media, everything is accessible from a browser.

cookiecaper 8y ago

Similar situation here -- my mom uses Linux and my dad insists on Windows (to be fair, he has tried Linux here and there). My mom's computer has been trucking for over 10 years and after initial setup, she has rarely had issues. My dad has been through 4 different systems in the same amount of time and each one ends up riddled with malware and nigh unusable before he decides he just needs to upgrade again. In my dad's case, major barriers to adoption are a) EVER rendering an MS Office document noticeably incorrectly, on either end; b) DRM'd video components like Comcast's Xfinity streaming services; c) a feeling that he doesn't really have control over it and can't just search for any software he wants and be able to use it, or can't Google a concern and find reasonably-basic instructions to get something to happen. Those are all fairly legitimate concerns, I guess I'm just bothered by the way he treats all of these as direct failures of the OS rather than applying a little more flexibility -- if not to his computing habits in general, at least to his interpretation of the situation.

richardwhiuk 8y ago
If switching OS creates those problems, it's entirely reasonable to blame the OS. An attitude of "switch to Linux and if you can't do anything that you used to do then it's something else's fault" while possibly fair is exceptionally unhelpful.
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  s/anything you used to/a small handful of specific things/ I'm not trying to say that this is a solution to the problems entailed, and I'm not even saying that he should be obliged to go through the inconvenience of using a different OS if it doesn't fulfill all of his needs. There's just an air around the tone that's frustrating. In general I would hope that performance, security, and system longevity would count for something, but I guess it's like telling someone to eat their vegetables. People are happier to just deal with a constant background malaise they can acclimate to and then ignore than they are to have the centralized in-the-moment friction of "to do thing X, switch to a separate VM/laptop/etc." And I mean, I get that. So the conclusion is probably that Linux is not stable enough for a potential user until there is very little risk that that user's inertia will ever be broken. This works pretty much fine for my mom since she just needs basic word processing, a scanner, and a web browser. Not as much for my dad.

bigbugbag 8y ago

You may be interested in looking into borg to replace rsnapshot. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://github.com/borgbackup/borg-import https://github.com/borgbackup/borg-import https://github.com/borgbackup/borgweb https://github.com/borgbackup/borgweb https://github.com/borgbase/vorta https://github.com/borgbase/vorta

loosescrews 8y ago

Which distro are you using? I am particularly interested in the auto-install of normal updates.