4 ms·

I am just a couple of years older than you, also using Windows since 3.0 (and MS-DOS for years before that) and Redhat Linux since the 90's. I've moved all my f

I am just a couple of years older than you, also using Windows since 3.0 (and MS-DOS for years before that) and Redhat Linux since the 90's. I've moved all my family over to Fedora, and support calls have dropped enormously. Windows 8 was the straw the broke the camel's back for most of them. They actually found Linux (sometimes with skinned XFCE) more familiar coming from Windows 7. I will accept that if you buy new low end hardware you may occasionally have driver issues, but the last few Lenovo AIO and Thinkpads I've bought all work flawlessly first time around. I will add that I've tried many vanilla Windows installs over the years, and without the special vendor drivers built in, found it to be even worse than Linux for compatibility. The hostility of modern Windows is just hard to accept to be honest. I get that my use-case doesn't apply to everyone, but I want people to know that if you do mostly web stuff etc... even as a non technical person, Linux can "just work".

tremon 5y ago
Same here, I gave my mother a dual-boot system (Windows+Debian) somewhere around 2008 (or so, given that it was Windows XP), and told her to switch to Linux for online banking (my father's online account was blocked twice due to suspicious activity). I also configured her Thunderbird mail client to use the Windows' data folder, so she could access her e-mail on both. A year later she told me she never started Windows any more, she used Linux all the time. Then my father's printer and sound card stopped working after upgrading to Windows 8, and I moved him to Linux as well. In all this time there's only one thing I couldn't fix for them: the library's audiobooks had some form of Adobe DRM on them, and of course it didn't support Linux. I told them to take up the issue with their library, but of course they didn't have a satisfactory resolution to the problem.

tremon 5y ago

Same here, I gave my mother a dual-boot system (Windows+Debian) somewhere around 2008 (or so, given that it was Windows XP), and told her to switch to Linux for online banking (my father's online account was blocked twice due to suspicious activity). I also configured her Thunderbird mail client to use the Windows' data folder, so she could access her e-mail on both. A year later she told me she never started Windows any more, she used Linux all the time. Then my father's printer and sound card stopped working after upgrading to Windows 8, and I moved him to Linux as well. In all this time there's only one thing I couldn't fix for them: the library's audiobooks had some form of Adobe DRM on them, and of course it didn't support Linux. I told them to take up the issue with their library, but of course they didn't have a satisfactory resolution to the problem.