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After hearing complaints for years from my mom about how slow her laptops were (with Windows), we bought her a NUC and I put elementary on it. That was about 4
by fredleblanc 6y ago
After hearing complaints for years from my mom about how slow her laptops were (with Windows), we bought her a NUC and I put elementary on it. That was about 4 years ago. Since then: not one single complaint.
She’s not a power user. She uses a web browser for Facebook, her bank stuff, and to play silly word games and puzzles. She checks email. But even those two tasks were enough to land her into trouble on seemingly any Windows machine we put in front of her.
I assume she was clicking on questionable ads, accidentally visiting who knows what websites from weird Facebook clicks, etc. but since she’s not on Windows, she’s less of a haphazard target.
Whenever I’m a good son and visit her, I’ll make sure everything’s updated and it usually is. She knows to click the update button when it asks.
I’m sure this could have been ANY Linux that would have fixed this, but Elementary looks the most simple, and that’s what it’s a great fit for her. It’s easy to use, easy to keep updated, and won’t virus itself up when your mom clicks on weird banner ads. All in a cheap little package. (Which I get could have been even cheaper.)
- Nextgrid 6y ago> Whenever I’m a good son and visit her, I’ll make sure everything’s updated and it usually is. She knows to click the update button when it asks The advantage of a Linux machine is that SSH is both trivial to setup & use but also reasonably secure to leave exposed to the Internet (as opposed to RDP) which is great for remote maintenance & troubleshooting.
- fredleblanc 6y agoI know, but “I’ve converted my regular visits to SSH tunnels” doesn’t go over well with moms. :)
- dsr_ 6y ago"I can fix that in a few minutes" versus "I can come visit you in two weeks" does work well, though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kodah 6y agoI'm just going to put out there that to my mom, priorities are different. She'll absolutely prefer a video/phone call and visit to me just solving her problem.
- fredleblanc 6y agoThe thing about her using Elementary is that these things haven’t come up in the years she’s been on it. I’m sure I just jinxed it now though.
- nkozyra 6y agoEspecially if you live in the same town :)
- atoav 6y agoHad the same experience with Ubuntu and my mother, who is similarily not a power user. Even the software she uses to create her photo books had a linux variant, the printer worked out of the box. Before that she had quesions about the computer every week, after that she maybe asked me once every two months and was very happy.
- fredleblanc 6y agoThe printer support really blew me away. Maybe I still have PTSD from trying to get any peripheral to work with anything that required a driver when I was younger, but that you can just plug and play anywhere these days (on Linux or Mac or Windows) still makes me smile.
- pacifika 6y agoProbably not PTSD
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoIs she still on the version from 4 years ago, then? IIRC, my biggest complaint about eOS was that you could not upgrade it between major versions, and had to do a clean install every time.
- fredleblanc 6y agoYeah, that part sucks. She started on Loki (not that she knows that) and I upgraded things to Juno and that was enough for me. Luckily, her life on the computer is a printer driver and a browser window, so there wasn't much that needed re-configuring.
- kodah 6y agoAnecdotally, elementary OS is the only OS I've gotten my mom to use consistently. She's 70+ and Windows absolutely confuses her.
- fredleblanc 6y agoIt really is “just enough computer: the OS.”
- agumonkey 6y agoI need to force myself a bit and setup a "study" giving people eos on old laptops and ask them to live in it for a month. And kudos to the team, even it's highly macos inspired (someone would say stolen or lifted) it was a brilliant ~replica and felt great right away.