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I made Linux Mint the primary OS on my son's first laptop some 3-years ago when he was around 12, and he's taken to it like a fish to water. He's even taken to

by msravi 5y ago

I made Linux Mint the primary OS on my son's first laptop some 3-years ago when he was around 12, and he's taken to it like a fish to water. He's even taken to using regolith as his (tiling) window manager now, and prefers to use vim for programming (python/julia/c) rather than any IDE. Also have Mint installed on my mom's laptop - she only uses the browser and is ok with it - she has no idea of what an OS even is. IMO, the only thing preventing Linux's more widespread adoption is the reputation that it's only meant for developers, and OEMs not providing an option to have it pre-installed.

evolve2k 5y ago
I did the same for my kids and now my son is 19 and is now quite the Linux pro and advocate. He corrects me “I use Arch btw”.
Loughla 5y ago
Any time I have a family member who asks me to 'fix a problem' with their machine, my first step is to copy all important files, and then evaluate their use of the machine. 99.9% of the time, they use it for e-mail, internet browsing, and maybe home banking. I put mint on everyone's machines and don't look back. It's just so stupid easy, and has drastically reduced the 'tech calls' I receive. At this point, I have no idea what's holding linux back. Seriously, mint is so user friendly that it's sort of confusing why people don't use it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- iFreilicht 5y ago
  Marketing and pre-installation on devices. Seriously ChromeOS and chromebooks have been gaining huge marketshare, Linux could've been that if there was any player interested and wealthy enough to put on a similar campaign to what google did.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
That's a great idea. It may be too late for me but my sons will be ninja developers who use vim like pros, instead of that Microsoft electron behemoth.
danShumway 5y ago
Both of my nieces are running Ubuntu, it's been a big win in reduction of support calls and ease of setting things up for them. My only regret is that I should have been braver and put them on Manjaro. I thought Ubuntu would be more "set it and forget it" and maybe have better documentation, but some of my most annoying support calls I've gotten have been dealing with driver issues that just weren't present on Manjaro at all. And I generally think the Arch documentation is a lot better than Ubuntu's anyway. > the only thing preventing Linux's more widespread adoption I think I disagree with this in some ways; I think absent any support at all Linux would be difficult for some people. But if you have someone around who's good with Linux, I think it'll be more stable than Windows and have a lot fewer annoyances/problems. I know that I would be debugging a Windows install more often and that it would be more annoying to do, because I have other family members who run Windows and I know what kinds of issues they're running into.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  I switched from manjaro to Ubuntu recently after an update made my system unbootable. Took me a week to find the time to sit down and debug it, and the manjaro live USB wasn’t working at all so I had to try my repairs with a live Ubuntu USB. I never had something like that with Ubuntu that I couldn’t fix in 15 mins
  - danShumway 5y ago
    I think it sometimes depends. If you're doing a lot of stuff with your system, the rolling release schedule means you get fixes faster, and Arch's documentation is pretty good for a lot of other stuff. Manjaro is more likely to "just work" with things, because it has newer drivers. On the other hand, Ubuntu is pretty stable as long as you stick with what it provides and you're not going too far off the beaten path. Ubuntu feels very consistent to me, it just also feels a lot more stubborn, and I find myself fighting with it more whenever I plug in devices or configure it in a non-obvious way. I think I just misjudged what side of that divide my nieces would be on. Small stuff like, I got them a drawing tablet and on Manjaro, it plugs in and the Gnome settings detect it, and the config is all graphical. Ubuntu has the same Gnome settings and the tablet works, but the settings don't detect the tablet at all, so to get buttons configured and left-handed mode working I needed to wire up xsetwacom and use dbus to detect when the tablet was plugged in. And that was made harder by the fact that there wasn't a lot of Ubuntu documentation for how that stuff worked, I basically used the Arch documentation and mentally translated some of the commands for Ubuntu. But I think that's dependent on the person and what their needs are. If I had bought a more mainstream tablet for them, maybe they wouldn't have had that problem. My regret with Ubuntu is that I didn't realize how often I would want to be able to get things like a more recent kernel without compiling it myself. Ubuntu seems a lot more obtuse to me when it does break. Everything is relative, they're both still Linux under the hood, and both are less likely than Windows to randomly break imo. I've gotten support calls from Windows family members about drivers just randomly not working one day because something updated behind the scenes without their input and started conflicting, about buying external displays that just don't get detected at all, and I don't even know how to start debugging issues like that. Even with Ubuntu, I don't really get that many support calls, mostly the computers just work.

by msravi 5y ago

evolve2k 5y ago

I did the same for my kids and now my son is 19 and is now quite the Linux pro and advocate. He corrects me “I use Arch btw”.

Loughla 5y ago

Any time I have a family member who asks me to 'fix a problem' with their machine, my first step is to copy all important files, and then evaluate their use of the machine. 99.9% of the time, they use it for e-mail, internet browsing, and maybe home banking. I put mint on everyone's machines and don't look back. It's just so stupid easy, and has drastically reduced the 'tech calls' I receive. At this point, I have no idea what's holding linux back. Seriously, mint is so user friendly that it's sort of confusing why people don't use it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iFreilicht 5y ago
Marketing and pre-installation on devices. Seriously ChromeOS and chromebooks have been gaining huge marketshare, Linux could've been that if there was any player interested and wealthy enough to put on a similar campaign to what google did.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

That's a great idea. It may be too late for me but my sons will be ninja developers who use vim like pros, instead of that Microsoft electron behemoth.

danShumway 5y ago

Both of my nieces are running Ubuntu, it's been a big win in reduction of support calls and ease of setting things up for them. My only regret is that I should have been braver and put them on Manjaro. I thought Ubuntu would be more "set it and forget it" and maybe have better documentation, but some of my most annoying support calls I've gotten have been dealing with driver issues that just weren't present on Manjaro at all. And I generally think the Arch documentation is a lot better than Ubuntu's anyway. > the only thing preventing Linux's more widespread adoption I think I disagree with this in some ways; I think absent any support at all Linux would be difficult for some people. But if you have someone around who's good with Linux, I think it'll be more stable than Windows and have a lot fewer annoyances/problems. I know that I would be debugging a Windows install more often and that it would be more annoying to do, because I have other family members who run Windows and I know what kinds of issues they're running into.

gentleman11 5y ago
I switched from manjaro to Ubuntu recently after an update made my system unbootable. Took me a week to find the time to sit down and debug it, and the manjaro live USB wasn’t working at all so I had to try my repairs with a live Ubuntu USB. I never had something like that with Ubuntu that I couldn’t fix in 15 mins
- danShumway 5y ago
  I think it sometimes depends. If you're doing a lot of stuff with your system, the rolling release schedule means you get fixes faster, and Arch's documentation is pretty good for a lot of other stuff. Manjaro is more likely to "just work" with things, because it has newer drivers. On the other hand, Ubuntu is pretty stable as long as you stick with what it provides and you're not going too far off the beaten path. Ubuntu feels very consistent to me, it just also feels a lot more stubborn, and I find myself fighting with it more whenever I plug in devices or configure it in a non-obvious way. I think I just misjudged what side of that divide my nieces would be on. Small stuff like, I got them a drawing tablet and on Manjaro, it plugs in and the Gnome settings detect it, and the config is all graphical. Ubuntu has the same Gnome settings and the tablet works, but the settings don't detect the tablet at all, so to get buttons configured and left-handed mode working I needed to wire up xsetwacom and use dbus to detect when the tablet was plugged in. And that was made harder by the fact that there wasn't a lot of Ubuntu documentation for how that stuff worked, I basically used the Arch documentation and mentally translated some of the commands for Ubuntu. But I think that's dependent on the person and what their needs are. If I had bought a more mainstream tablet for them, maybe they wouldn't have had that problem. My regret with Ubuntu is that I didn't realize how often I would want to be able to get things like a more recent kernel without compiling it myself. Ubuntu seems a lot more obtuse to me when it does break. Everything is relative, they're both still Linux under the hood, and both are less likely than Windows to randomly break imo. I've gotten support calls from Windows family members about drivers just randomly not working one day because something updated behind the scenes without their input and started conflicting, about buying external displays that just don't get detected at all, and I don't even know how to start debugging issues like that. Even with Ubuntu, I don't really get that many support calls, mostly the computers just work.