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> but I know they would call my bluff and ultimately I would end up caving

Don't bluff then!

I'd been trying to recommend Linux to my family for many years with no success. I stopped, perhaps a decade ago.

Some two years ago or so, my father decided he was done with Windows (updates, always trying to sell you something or another, etc) and switched to Linux. Now he keeps telling me how much better the Linux experience is. I'm rather amused by that, but also proud of him for having made the jump all by himself.

(He's into astro photography, so he spent a lot of time with raspberry pi's and learned some Linux along the way. I guess that made his desktop switch easier.)

I used to be Windows tech support for my family. But I have been on Linux so long now I genuinely don't know how to help them. So that burden has passed.

I have enough problems with the Windows my son has that I can't fix. Hardware randomly working one day and not the next (but works fine on the Linux system). Having to reinstall when updates break the system. Strange blue screen error codes where there's really no useful info online on how to resolve.

I've been making the case for him to switch to Linux now that win 10 is not supported and all his games will run on Steam on Linux anyway now.

We gave our parents an iPad for Christmas. Now they have two and never turn on their computer.

I could probably convince my mom on that. My dad still writes a fair bit of code (GNU Octave, mostly), and so an iPad would be a decided downgrade.

MacBook Air then

Yeah, I think I'd be more successful with trying to convince them to move to a Mac.

“I switched to Linux years ago, and don’t really know Windows 11. Good luck!”

Your parents are adults, they can make their own decisions and deal with the outcomes.

Easier said than done. I love my parents and ultimately I do want to help them when they’re stuck with stuff, and I know if I the situation were reversed they’d do the same for me.

Are you actually good at Windows 11? Are you really helping them as much as you could be that way?

I don’t think I could help somebody set up modern Windows. If I help someone with a computer, I’m telling them I’ve got it into a reasonably usable and safe state. With all the spyware built into a modern Windows system, I don’t think I could be confident there.

I mean, I'm not "good" at it exactly, but a lot of the old Windows XP terminology still applies (e.g. "run", "dxdiag", "device manager"), and I have a bit more intuition about computers than they do, so I can usually brute force a solution to their problems. I don't have any non-virtualized Windows computers in my house, so it is always me figuring it out, but I generally am able to figure stuff out quicker than they can.

I agree with your point though, and I've tried explaining that to them; if something is broken on your Linux box I can get you to send me a tmate URL and I can likely fix any problem you have quickly just because I am much more used to it. At some point I probably should try doing the ultimatum.

My little imaginary quote had a “good luck” at the end which made it look really flip. But, really, I think “I’m getting less and less familiar with Windows as time goes by” is more of a… gentler… way of putting the ultimatum.

You are assuming they're not doing it deliberately.

A lot of old people have figured out that you can get other people do do stuff for you by pretending you don't understand it yourself.

I genuinely do not think they are doing it deliberately, at least not at any conscious level. I guess I don't know their inner psyche but I genuinely think that when they ask for help it's because they feel like they need help.

It might not be the case for you, but people generally like to help their close family members.

It seems like they actually are having trouble supporting their parents on Windows, based on their other comments.

I mean this is basically the ultimatum idea, but presenting it as an unavoidable limitation rather than an arbitrary unwillingness to help.

Comments like these are unwarranted.

While the parent comment indicates that a child is possibly overstepping, your comment is a greater overstep.

I didn't think it was so bad. It's a valid response.

I mean, it is my comment; I wouldn’t have made it if I thought there was anything wrong with it. But, I’m really struggling to see anything objectionable in it at all.

> [2] If anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider a career in literally anything else. Software development clearly isn't for you. There are many other positions out there and I suspect you'd be better at nearly any of them than you are at writing software.

I started the switch from Windows to Linux in 1999, so have no up-to-date firsthand experience. But, do you think the issues with Windows Update go much beyond the problems with updating arbitrary hardware running software that's in an arbitrary state due to how users have used it?

What I'd say to those Windows Update developers is they should go to Apple, where they can rely on a much more standardized hardware environment and a much more locked-down software environment, which makes that job a lot easier.

I don't think that the god-awfulness of Windows Update is in any way related to the hardware you're running when anything else on the market designed for the same purpose outperforms it.

Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.

How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.

To be clear, this wasn't some custom hack job computer or anything. This was a relatively cheap HP laptop that was just using OEM Windows 10. The hardware is about as vanilla as you get for a laptop.

Linux has the same or even greater hardware diversity, and I have never had a Linux update so thoroughly break my computer as Windows Update did for my mom's computer recently. I run NixOS unstable, I run a system update daily, and while I have had packages break, it still boots after the update. I can say similar things about Arch as well, and I think Ubuntu LTS would be even more reliable.

Windows Update is worse though, because since Windows doesn't have snapshotting in the same way that Linux can have with btrfs or ZFS or bcachefs, an update can fully just break the computer. If you install ZFS on root in Ubuntu it will take a snapshot after each update or even every `sudo apt install`, so even if I did have something break because of an update I'm generally able to get the computer into a usable state by rebooting an choosing something earlier.

But even worse, Windows updates aren't really "opt-in" like they are with Mac and Linux. Windows Updates will happen accidentally or just in the background, as was the case with my mom a few weeks ago. As far as she is aware, she didn't choose the update, it just happened and then her computer was bricked.

Importantly, Windows Update really only has one job, which is to not brick the computer it's updating, or at the very least provide an easy way to roll back if they do. Updates are important, we want security vulnerabilities patched ASAP, but if users are afraid to update out of fear of their computer being bricked and actively do hacks to disable them, then they have utterly failed at their job.

I stand by what I said. Whomever works on it should be ashamed of themselves, and they should stop being software engineers because they are very bad at it. I have never used a piece of software that has more consistently caused headaches than Windows Update; I'm sure I've used software that was more crappily written, but a system update tool IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY.

Meh, Linux Mint has some serious rough edges from my experience. Suspend doesn’t work if multiple users are logged in, save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!) [0], audio devices are not shared between users, some drives don't mount on boot, etc. These problems are probably fixable if you have the know-how but it isn't great for the tech illiterate.

That being said, I have never had kernel panics or opened my computer to find a corrupted OS after a bad update (unlike Windows), so there's that.

[0] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/issues/137

I am not sure my parents have ever had multiple accounts on any of their computers, so I don’t think that particular suspend bug would be an issue, and I haven’t encountered the save as dialog bug, though I don’t dispute that it happens (I just don’t run Gnome or Cinnamon anymore).

Even still, even if it does require a tech-literate person to fix, they have access to that by me, and I can likely fix it for them in a few minutes with tmate or something, as opposed to Windows Update bricking the computer, which required basically an entire day from me to fix.

Oh, and if an update does cause an issue, Linux has competent snapshotting tools because they have filesystems that didn’t coexist with dinosaurs and as such if something breaks a fix is a reboot (and probably a twenty minute phone call with me) away. On Ubuntu if you install ZFS on root you can configure it to take an auto snapshot before updates, for example.

> save-as dialog windows open under the current window (a 7-year old bug!!!)

This probably does not affect everyone because I have never seen this issue in Mint

I've seen this same behaviour in Wine (of all things): Installshield messageboxes regularly appear below the install progress window, making it appear stuck. It's so common that the first thing I do when installing anything is to move the progress window away from the center of the screen.

Not using Mint though.

I also do this, out of habit from my Windows days, where this bug existed, too :)

If their use is mostly web-centric, get them a second device with Linux on that. Then when Windows has problems again, the value proposition starts to become clear and it's sitting right there ready to use.

I couldn't get my spouse to try till her computer died, I installed it and said try for a day, I had to use linux to fix the computer (not a lie). See how it goes. She's a gimp wizard now (odd sentence). And very flexible on oses. The only killer app for her is excel on windows. "mac excel is crap". yes honey, yes it is.

I don’t know enough about the advanced parts of Excel so I am a little curious; is the browser version of Excel crappy?

The browser version is limited in the ways you’d expect. The Mac OS native version is limited in ways you can’t comprehend. Until you realize they’re fighting apple for enterprise contracts.

yeah there are big limitations on the browser version compared to desktop excel, but mostly in power user areas.

Which for an application like Excel, is really the only stuff that matters.

Because Excel is actually pretty awful software. But! You can use it as a database and application and hack something together and throw it on a shared drive somewhere.

If you lose that second stuff, there's no reason left to use Excel.

Has she tried LibreOffice Calc?

yes, it's not excel for windows. it's different. if she's hitting those differences she might as well a) run excel in a vm or b) learn another tool like sheets that's more acessible/sharable, or python.

it also doesn't work with some of her old workbooks or with her mom's copy of excel

Have you tried LibreOffice Calc? It’s so quirky and different from proper Excel. I would never recommend this to a family member, no matter how much better Linux is to Windows. In fact, the office suite is probably the only reason I might consider not recommending Linux.

I mean, it gets the job done but nothing is convenient. The UI looks like a Christmas tree and still everything you need to do is found several sub-menus down in confusing dialogs, like in Excel pre-ribbon times. And for the love of god, please don’t say that ribbon spoiled everything, that discussion was boring even 10 years ago. Since then, state of the art has evolved beyond that.

For small scale household data, the web version of excel is good enough and has an easier UI. For larger scale, duckdb and some python.

Fwiw, I fully agree with you. Any MS Office between 2000 and 2013 was consistent and easy to use with some experience. LibreOffice is not. It has such a strange UI and has needlessly complicated or convoluted ways to do things. It feels like waterfall/checklist software where everything "is technically possible".

I switched to OnlyOffice even though its capabilities are extremely limited for any non-trivial use case.

> Have you tried LibreOffice Calc?

It's my daily driver ever since...

> ribbon spoiled everything

You don't need to get their permission. Just install Linux (mint or any other flavor) and they will get used to it. Did this for a bunch of family members and after a few weeks of transition nobody ever complained after

I live several states away from them, so unless I manage to sneak in some elaborate KVM switch and abuse it in the rare time my mom is plugged into her desk, I don’t think that’s viable.

I suppose I could do it when I come down and visit when they’re not looking, though I think they would be pretty pissed if I did that.

How about having Linux in a VM, for them to try out...

Hah, one could lie and say "Inside this window called Virtual Box is what Windows 12 will look like, it's a chance to learn it!".

I'm not going to lie to them, they're not children and they're not idiots, they would figure it out pretty quick.

If I installed a VM for them, they would use it exactly once, right after I installed it for them, and then never again.

My suggestion is not completely serious.

Heh, "not children" but you complain about having to coddle them and their childish incapability/unwillingness to learn. Meh, enjoy your problem.

In fairness, there have been plenty of times I have had to message my mom (an attorney) for legal advice, and messaged my dad (an aerospace engineer) for help with math or any kind of non-software engineering, so it's not like they're terribly selfish; if the shoe were on the other foot they'd do the same for me.

While I do find it really irritating that they refuse to leave Windows and I do find their unwillingness to learn new stuff about computers infuriating, I do get it.

Linux has gotten a lot better and easier to use now, but historically there's a reason that it has been associated as a "nerd operating system". Prior to about ~10 years ago, desktop Linux was decidedly unpolished and difficult to use. Getting video and audio drivers working used to be a long and difficult ordeal, package managers were non-intuitive, and we hadn't fully gotten the "web apps have taken over the world" state that we're in now. I've been running Linux for like the last fifteen years and for quite awhile Linux had a well-earned reputation of being hard to use, and I think my parents are afraid of that.

It's gotten much better now, and I think a lot of people could pretty easily migrate without too much issue, but I can't completely blame people for still thinking about how crappy it used to be.

Agreed. Find a distro that most looks like their current setup (maybe Zorin OS?), customize it so it has all the app icons and bookmarks etc in the same position as their Windows set up, and just leave them to it.

If you don't want to be sneaky about it, just install it next time Windows craps itself.

Did they not complain because nobody in your family talks to you anymore?

Funny take, but no, because most of their regular problems went away

can you set them up with dual boot to try it out? maybe they won't miss it once you get it setup for you them and then you can just 86 windows

You can find a story that sells it

I always try to convince people that by staying in the same thing for longer, eventually they will need to switch and everything will be much harder.

The brain needs to stay flexible.

Good luck

Do the ultimatum or force them onto it. They will thank you later.

The problem is that even if i did manage to install it on their computer, I don’t think they would just get used to it, they would bitch at me and then just go to Best Buy and purchase a new computer.

I would make a back up of their Windows. Force onto Linux, train them. Make all the icons obvious and look like Windows. Pin their most used applications. Let them run for a bit and see if they request Windows. You have the backup so they can always go back. I bet she never buys a computer.

I'm not going to lie to them, I think that would be wrong and try and tell them it's actually Windows, though if I were upfront and just made the icons look like Windows that would be ok. Even with the default Cinnamon icon styling, if I put Chrome on the desktop they'd figure it out, but even if I were to somehow objectively prove that OnlyOffice or LibreOffice or Calligra or <insert Linux office application here> are better than Microsoft Office, unless I can get the desktop version of Microsoft Office working on there I'm pretty confident that they won't go for it.

I recently tried to get my mom to use the PWA of Word online, and she said it was "worse" than the desktop version but refused to elaborate as to why.

I know I sound like I'm being harsh on my parents, but it's not like they're stupid or anything. They have spent the last 30+ years using Windows and Microsoft Office, I don't blame them for relying on the tools that they have spent the last three decades learning; I use command line tools that have existed longer than I have [1]. I do understand the stubbornness even if it does drive me a little crazy.

[1] Yes I know that GCC and Emacs and tar and grep have gotten updates since they've been released, but so has Windows.

This may or may not help, but have a look at ZorinOS. The latest release and it's announcement is targeted towards those wanting to jump ship from Windows -> Linux. They've tried to account for the adjustment with built-in tips/prompts and the UI looks closer to Windows also.

You're right, Office is where you will struggle.

https://blog.zorin.com/2025/10/14/zorin-os-18-has-arrived/

I've actually played with Zorin a bit in a virtual machine. It seemed cool enough, and I tried showing my parents screenshots of it to show them how Linux isn't that different than Windows, but they were unconvinced.

I managed to get Winboat working on my NixOS laptop, so it's possible that if I set that up they could deal with it.

I actually tell people to avoid Arch-based distros for beginners. They can break really easily with the rolling release. Something LTS would be better.

I never suggested you to lie to them, I suggested you set the UI so it’s familiar…because that’s really easy to do. Still inform them it’s Linux but make it useable like Windows.

Seems like you have it all figured out though, I think I’ve shared enough help good luck.

maybe just give them an old laptop with linux to try and if it is not too bad, they might be okay with changing the main machine.

on the positive side, if their main machine is old, there are no longer win10 updates.

The laptop that caused all this shit was from 2019. Not "ancient" but not exactly "new" either, and the issue was because Windows Update did an auto-update to Windows 11 and decided my mom didn't need her computer to boot anymore. When I walked them through flashing Windows 11 onto a flash drive (using a stock Windows 11 image using Microsoft's own flashing tools) and installing it manually it worked fine, so it was specifically Windows Update that broke things, not Windows 11 itself.

I've had updates break Linux and cause things to not boot anymore, and those aren't fun, but generally fixing it boils down to rebooting to a previous snapshot [1], or logging in with the command line running like three commands.

I did try fixing the computer before we nuked it. I tried walking them through the Windows auto repair, which didn't do anything (but at least it took a long time), and I tried booting into safe mode, but it wouldn't get any farther than the regular boot did. Apparently there is a way to get into a Powershell live-boot (though I didn't know this at the time), so maybe I could have fixed it with that, anything is possible, but ultimately my solution was getting the to flash a live USB of Ubuntu, and I then mounted the drive and rsync'd everything to my server.

[1] Because Microsoft still doesn't have Copy on Write (despite being a proven and more than 20 year old bit of tech) and so they can't do good snapshotting.

Just force. Install linux and find an excuse like you'll do windows next week because reasons. Works wonders.

Install Linux, call it "Windows 11" and blame everything on Microsoft and AI?

Unless they've got a genuine Windows app that they need, you might be able to get away with it...

I'm not going to lie to them about this. They're not stupid and even if they were that would be wrong.

Even if I did do that, I'm quite confident that unless I install the desktop version of Microsoft Office, they would never go for it.