A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend’s then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife’s friend say something funny that I thought I’d share with you.
They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid’s first computer, and his mom doesn’t have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn’t be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn’t visit that often, and the kid’s games still worked so it wasn’t a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.
When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I’d give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:
This Linux thing… We’ve never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.
Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.
My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.
I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.
I just have to do a system update every year or so.
She’s now 87.
For my my father I only have to make sure it looks not so different after each major upgrade. I have to be careful when there are new things, but apart from that he can do everything for himself except these major upgrades and backups.
So, he is happy with Fedora and Gnome classic.
Pretty much the requirement for my wife. She really struggled with inconsistency of Windows and how slow it responded. Move to Linux, and she runs it fine with no more complaints, she just wants it identical after a version upgrade or if there is a reinstall ever needed. So for her I went with NixOS and have her config files stored for later.
Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.