This contradicts my experience.
I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine.
I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They love it.
I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine.
I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They love it.
I started out using DOS in the mid 90's to play games, used Windows 3.1, skipped over to 98SE then XP and 7.
I have used Macs before, not enough to make an impression.
I tried Linux back when I was in collage during the XP days but it always seemed to need more tweaking than my XP install and the lack of gaming kept me on Windows.
Currently I am running Linux Mint. I install the OS and go. No need to tweak or mess with command line.
I am not that interested in which OS I am running aside from the fact that I dislike telemetry and forced updates. I want the OS to get our of the way so that I can do whatever I am trying to do, Linux seems to be there now. It feels like Windows has regressed, with setting pages buried in 5 different places.
They don't like free, stable and fast? They don't like how it isn't going after your wallet every 5 minutes?
It's gotta be propaganda at work. It's the only explanation.
Maybe you just use it for web browsing. But for everyone else, there's Windows. Which is still crap but at least you can set an environment variable without doing a research project into the differences between .bash_profile, .bashrc, .profile, and /etc/environment. None of which have a GUI. And the best part is that none of them can ever be renamed because muh scripts would break and the entire OS would come crashing down.
I think you're trying to say that they don't have problems with the browser, and maybe an email client. If they're computer-illiterate, they don't know enough about an operating system to have an opinion at all, other than being happy about it turning on and off when they want.
Don't mistake that for loving Linux, because it is not really praise of Linux, it is praise for a computer that works well enough to run a web browser, which is an extremely low bar.
Meanwhile the latest supported versions of MacOS or Windows will not work on such a machine. Those ecosystems demand you continually buy new hardware.
I think is -is- Linux they love here.
Ubuntu on hardware a few years old will chug along without issues more often than not especially if you are just using it as a glorified thin client for Chrome which is an increasingly large base of users.
There are of course some gotchas with things like integrated graphics and dedicated graphics in laptops or some device drivers for peripherals like printers (it is still linux after all, year of the linux desktop any year now aha)
They all roll Debian stable with unattended_upgrades and it's an absolute joy of stability.
Not that I would use Debian stable for my personal machines: I want the latest shiniest and I want to be close to upstream to report bugs when they're fresh and easy to fix by the maintainer (yes, "I use arch btw" indeed), but for "computer-illiterate" people, stability trumps everything else.
The "computer illiterate" isn't amused by constant breaking behavior / visual changes. They want the thing to work reliably and unsurprisingly. Debian delivers this and never breaks. Once every major dist-upgrade I review changes with them, and they're good to go until next time.
- That being said, a well-configured/simplified Plasma these would certainly be all well (or not, see my final paragraph below about locking things down; GNOME is less infinitely configurable than KDE/Plasma, so there's less room for user fuckup). Also I'm certainly biased towards GNOME because that's what I choose to use for my machines. Also also, I go where there are the most eyeballs (again, for stability & maximal guarantee that bugs are seen), and for now it's GNOME.
- Exception: one grandma has a particularly old laptop (x86-32 old :D) with meager RAM, so for her setup I went with MATE. I hesitated between LxQt and MATE, tried both, and MATE (at the time) seemed a tad more polished.
Finally, since I have your interest and GUIs are a subject I love ranting about, one more thing you need to do when setting up an old ladies machine, is to LOCK DOWN ALL THE THINGS YOU CAN:
- LibreOffice toolbars that can be accidentally dragged, then maybe dragged offscreen or closed? LOCK THEM.
- Thunderbird folder column titles that will change email ordering if accidentally clicked? HIDE THEM with userChrome.css until https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237051 is fixed.
- Etc etc, when I'm done provisioning such a machine, I spend an hour playing with it and wondering "How could someone haphazardly clicking and dragging everywhere break/mismanage this?" , and I disable/lock/hide everything I can. There is a million configurable / breakable things that we power users don't imagine being confusing to a user, because we know the features and we're precise at clicking on stuff. But to non-computerists, these things are veeeeery confusing! They'll email you with a gibberish issue description when invoked accidentally, and when it happens too often they get scared. There's potential to build a whole distribution aimed at such users, with everything properly locked down.
Might be more intuitive than locking them?
I couldn't check it as I run Tb beta (which the extension doesn't support last time I check), but I might give it a try next time I maintain one of these machines ..... or not:
0. They never ever need to click it to re-order. Why bother with an unneeded feature?
1. Extensions break! UserChrome.css too, but maybe less so :) , and a CSS rule is simpler/smaller in added complexity & potential for bugs than an extension.
2. Also, hiding the columns means one less bit of chrome to read/parse. Hiding stuff avoids misclicks, but also increases GUI legibility for people with bad eyesight.
For the old ladies, no: Fedora has a short release cycle, and no LTS; not great for maximal stability. "a version of Fedora is usually supported for at least 13 months" ( https://endoflife.date/fedora ), while Debian is security-supported at least 5 years! ( https://endoflife.date/debian )
Debian's whole project architecture & release cycle is built towards being stable bedrock, I see virtually no reason to use anything else if you aim at max. stability and don't care about running old (but still secure!) software.