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Comment by i_dont_know_ | Hacker News Reader

Also want to ask if anyone has a 'parents' Linux setup that has worked well over the years... I tried once maybe 8 years ago and had to figure out how to walk my mom through a kernel panic through the phone... didn't work well :)

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My parents have been running Zorin OS lite for a couple years now, they have not had any problems with it. It's based on ubuntu and the lite version has xfce as the desktop. Runs great on their older computer, looks enough like windows that they jumped in without any issues, and it has a pretty basic interface.

My non-technical parents have been Mint for years with minimal problems. One thing that makes life easier is that they were okay with me enabling sshd for the cases when they want me to investigate something for them.

(An incidental benefit of a Linux household - the calls from "Microsoft" become a lot funnier and less scary.)

I have setup xubuntu for my parents to look similar to windows. No sudo access, no password default login on boot. Firefox/Chrome with ublock origin. Virtualbox with win10 is installed for Office. If at all anything happens I do a remote login and check/fix things. Works well so far.

I installed ubuntu for my grand father and, two years later, has not had any problem (whereas it took less than a week before he asked my do uninstall the adblocker I gave him...).

Have you - in later years - figured which distro if any, was the easiest and hassle-free, for older people in general (if not your parents specifically)?

My mom has been using Ubuntu MATE for a few years and doesn't even know it. I just put a Firefox icon on the desktop and it was basically the same as any other computer for her.

How would a BSOD be different in this scenario?

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