For his use case it's more user friendly than the Windows install because of the lack of constant update requests and antivirus stuff etc. etc. It's also faster on the same machine and the computer doesn't clog down every n month. I still remember that he asked me about 6 month in why the computer doesn't get slower :P
I'm fairly confident that a switch from Windows to macOS would have been a lot harder for him btw. Same for a switch to Windows 10 without making it look like the old Windows actually (not as confident in that statement as I don't know enough about Win10).
Come on guys, why always the linux + mother argument. Do not do it. It is silly.
Besides that: most of the time you probably have to give support on apps they use instead of os related issues.
I agree that Linux might not be great for our parents. As for my own mother, I moved her to a Mac mini years ago and that has reduced my support time solely to explaining how specific websites work. She can do lots of things on her own now, like debugging the wifi (shitty telco router), she creates her own booklets for the classes she teaches, etc.
With windows she'd be stuck on non-task related issues 80% of the time, which made it impossible for her to learn how to use the computer at all.
The harder people to move over are ones who have ingrained certain things like "I need WinRAR to open this kind of file", and not being able to independently research for alternatives. People with mid-level computer experience, but not much experience in new environments suffer a lot on these transitions.
Linux is for grandmothers, old electricians ... and seasoned sysadmins and programmers like me.
My non-techie wife wandered onto my Elementary OS installation one day while I was at work, and despite having never used anything but Windows on the desktop (not even a Mac) she navigated just fine without me there to guide her. She was able to use it to go online, find something she wanted to print, print it, and then download, edit, and save a photo she wanted for her blog. Granted, those weren't pro-level tasks, but it's typical of what your average Grandma will do with her PC. Everything the average user does these days is all done in the browser; Google grokked that, and we now have Chrome OS.
I'd love to move my mother to Elementary (I've previously considered a Chromebook for her but my new stance on Google gives me pause) just so she will not be as susceptible to drive-by malware. I think if you give folks a fighting chance, you'll find that Windows doesn't have to be the only OS for Mr. and Mrs. Average User.
I think you are the one making a joke rather. The overall Linux experience (when you choose the right hardware and when everything works as expected) is not bad, really. It's faster than a machine running on any other system, USB peripherals do not need tons of external drivers, you can choose the Windows Manager you prefer out of a dozen of them available, it has proper package management, user management with different levels of privileges, it does not need to reboot for every update like windows does, I could go on forever.
At best you can criticize some Linux distros for being unfamiliar for Windows or OSX users, but that's about it. The rest depends a lot more on what you do with it. If whoever uses it lives mostly in a browser, it makes basically no difference.
Since I installed Ubuntu on it I actually spend my time with her, not her computer. And she's happy about that, obviously, but also that her computer just works and she doesn't have to call me to get support all the time.
Picasa is/was great.
A couple of years later Iphones and Android appeared, and as I'm an Android user she picked one of those (to simplify potential support situations) and was very happy about her decision. (Because she liked the phone, not that she was getting support from me all the time.)
I'm sure some of her friends have Iphones, but that's never really come up as a thing. Maybe because the people my mom associate with aren't 8 years old with the need to flaunt their stuff in the face of everybody claiming "look my phone is so cool, woop woop, your phone sucks because you have a different brand!". ;-)
The reason why such things are harder to get to work in Linux sometimes is because such DRM-solutions are not always baked in or provided by the same providers as in windows, and might be proprietary.
Also companies like Netflix have been known to filter peoples useragent leading to the exclusion of Linux users. nowadays it's as easy as installing a Silverlight-alternative in your favourite browser or just running a chrome derived browser.
my main point being: it's not always Linux's fault that some things are hard.
I wonder why such people exist at all? They do - reading the comments up to here I saw them mentioned four or five times. Yet the mindset such people supposedly display is totally incomprehensible to me. I can't for the life of me understand why would anyone, when faced with a problem, automatically give up without researching and trying to solve it. This is how I - and probably most of us on HN - learned "computers" in the first place: hours and hours of typing and clicking random things until something happens.
Aside from where do they come from, another question is if we really need to cater to them? Are they truly a majority of users? Is the condition in-born, uncurable, or can they be educated?
> That one quarter of the population can’t use a computer at all is the most serious element of the digital divide.
Frightening... but why?
> To a great extent, this problem is caused by computers still being much too complicated for many people.
Ok, but this doesn't answer my other question - is it possible to educate these people to use the current computers, or do computers really need to be streamlined that much?
I asked myself the same question when I saw a documentary about analphabets. They quoted a number of about 8 million total and functional analphabets for Germany (among 80 million population), which is absolutely staggering.
To witness, people who cannot use a computer are often called "digital analphabets" or similar.
Some can be taught, but not all of them.
There is a significant fraction of the population that simply can't "get" certain concepts in a usable form. These are the same folks that are only capable of solving an algebra problem by rote, don't see the difference between making a word bold & italic and doing it indirectly by applying a custom style, etc.
It is important to note that this doesn't have anything to do with a lack of intelligence. Many smart developers struggle in an analogous way with pointers and pointer arithmetic, for example. Some people's brains just don't easily bend very far in certain directions.
certain games work only on consoles and not on windows so windows is not a suitable replacement of consoles for people who want to play those games.
Canonical actually spent money on user interface testing. I can find some activity for Gnome shell but I'm having problems digging up any solid testing for KDE.
Of course this made desktop a mess.
Many usability people also claim that it is good to have the menus attached to the top of the screen instead of attached to the window it affects.
Software recommended by usability people often have menus hidden away behind "gear" or "hamburger" icons.
I am not a usability expert but often I feel software is worse off after the ux people have had a say.
In particular it seems for many of them the goal is to mimic Mac OS X.
Unity (Canonical's fork of Gnome Shell) perpetrates neither the 'spatial' filer nor the hamburger thing. Gnome Shell's Nautilus no longer uses 'spatial' presentation either - I recollect that Acorn RISC-OS used that metaphor.
I think that menus at top of screen made perfect sense in the days of screens with resolutions of 512 x 342 - I used a Mac LC - and on netbooks which is where Unity came from after all. On a large monitor they make a lot less sense I agree - huge trek to the top of the screen to click on stuff and the danger of a misplaced click on the way changing the menus.
I stopped using Unity for ages because of the way it broke the 'ALT-F' style mnemonics (Alt-IOF to insert a typeset equation in LibreOffice &c) but things have improved recently.
I find myself in the strange position of actually rather liking Gnome shell from Debian Wheezy onward (3.8)
Linux Mint: my mother. two years since the switch and she loves it. can't say I don't either.
Arch Linux: my significant other. a year since she adopted it, and she can find her way around just fine.
FreeBSD: my father. with i3 and a couple of scripts, he's able to boot up into a single-use environment and do what he wants. very simple and easy and I don't have to touch his laptop for a long time.
so.. user friendly? user friendliness depends on the interface that you slap onto the front of the operating system. turns out, there are different UIs for different purposes!
and that's why linux is a good choice. underneath, it's secure, maintainable, and free. on top, it can look like anything you want, thanks to X and the various DE/WMs.
my mother needs a full-on Windows-like GUI, start menu and all. my SO needs a slim interface so she uses fluxbox, which with a click of her mouse has everything she needs in a convenient menu (plus workspaces), and my father doesn't need anything but a web browser.
the kernel doesn't matter to them if you dress it up nicely.
Linux runs better as a remotely administered machine than macos or windows, and can run photoshop cs2, unlike ios and chrome.
And "The WOW! Computer runs on a Linux operating system we’ve customized to support our touch screen capabilities. We chose Linux to avoid frequent problems with viruses and to provide a more secure, problem-free computer environment. Linux has been developed over the last 20 years by numerous companies and currently runs on millions of computers. In fact, about 60% of all internet servers run Linux."
So ...
Hell, when I introduced my mom to ubuntu ten years ago, Linux wasn't even as desktop friendly as it is now.
Not to say that it's the best choice, but it's plenty usable and user friendly.
Having said that, if she wanted a new computer right now, I'd probably recommend an iPad with a keyboard case (assuming that she can do what she wants with it, which I think she can -- most of her computer use nowadays is web browsing, email and the occasional word processing/spreadsheet. I use mine for everything except coding)
At the end of the day, its down to cost analysis: is it cheaper (in terms of time spent, for both of you) to leave things as they are and deal with support issues as they arise; or to retrain your mom to use something which has lower support overhead?
It may not make sense to get her to switch.
edit: The best thing about Linux for non-technical people is that the GUIs don't change radically (for marketing purposes) every year or two. Once you get used to something, you can generally keep it, and changes and modernizations will accumulate slowly instead of forcing an adjustment all at once.
iOS or Android, doesn't matter. All most people do is surf Facebook, check webmail/im, and do online shopping.
Moving these people over to a tablet reduces Family IT Support to practically zero.
If you don't want to even worry about that, include a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade as a cron job and everything will be up to date without them doing anything.
He was scared about downloading viruses and all that, to which I told him: you don't need to worry about it.
He's also on a mac sometimes, I wouldn't let
After many years the only problem ever occur was when she accepted upgrade proposal to Ubuntu 16.04 and then shortly after closed laptop so it's end up in half installed state. So it's would be smart not just setup unattended upgrades, but also disable all release upgrade suggestions.
Though I suppose for her ChromeOS could be enough too, but it's was too limited in offline mode and I not sure if she going to need new laptop anytime soon.
Also, Windows has annoying forced restarts and takes a long time to update. And it doesn't have a package manager. And drivers need to be annoying--needless waiting even for simple devices like a USB keyboard.
Problems come if they need more or are used to another OS.
ChromeOS is Linux. The principal difference between ChromeOS and Ubuntu is that if you want to run something other than Chrome then on Ubuntu you may and on ChromeOS you don't.
And the likes of Ubuntu have been easier to use than Windows for five years or more. The utility of Windows is if you need Windows-exclusive software or hardware, not that it's easier to use. And if that's your problem then you can't have ChromeOS or MacOS/iOS either.
You also can't lawfully install MacOS or iOS on the computers your family already has.
Linux is best for servers.
If you are using a Linux machine I'd still recommend that you double check for driver support on any hardware you buy. You can expect it to be okay but you should still check. You generally don't need to check for Windows, you can just assume and you will be right every time.
Haven't had a problem with wifi for a decade.
Double-checking for driver support is probably still worthwhile, but it's rare for it to be an issue these days, but I'd say it applies for Windows as well. Pretty much everything will have drivers for Windows, but their quality can be abysmal and you have require additional downloads.
It depends on the hardware. There is a lot of hardware that is still supported by Linux but has no drivers for any current Windows versions, because OEMs have no incentive to retroactively create drivers for new Windows versions for last year's hardware.
You literally have to find a "linux compatible" laptop, or else you risk running into constant driver problems. Not so with Windows, at least, and macOS comes on its own hardware.
I was unable to fix it for two-monitor setups reliably in 4 years. It will not go away until Wayland is properly supporting nvidia, which might be another 5 years. So there is that.