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People who have installed Linux on their parents computer, how did it go? Which distro do you recommend? Any tips? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There are always stories of people installing Linux on their parents computer to provide them a more secure and stable operating system, seems interesting to share experiences.

Edit: I'm assuming that parents are okay with the changes, or do not care. Obviously do not force anyone to switch OS if they don't want to.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Context: my mum's laptop is so old that velociraptors used it as a heating stone. So around 2022 (two years after W7 EoL) I gave her three options:

keep using Windows 7 - highly insecure, I heavily recommended against it, but it was still an option.
upgrade to Windows 10 - easier said than done because her computer is old, it would definitively not run well, and it's also a privacy nightmare.
switch to Linux - it has some rough edges here and there, she'd need to adapt herself to a different workflow, but we might be able to squeeze a bit more performance from it.

She eventually decided Linux, under the condition that any issue that she got she'd ask my help. (That was already the case - I was already the one doing maintenance of her machine.)

So I did. I went for Mint because it's the distro that I use, with Cinnamon there; it was closer to the W7 interface that she's used with. As she got used to the system she started asking less and less for my help, except when the computer is slow (quite a bit - again, velociraptors and stuff).

Recently I run some test with MATE in that computer (as it's lighter), and asked her if she could notice any difference in performance. She didn't, and she hated the DE so it's still running Cinnamon.