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Comment by jackvalentine | Hacker News Reader

I’m looking for a replacement OS for my mother in law whose computer is aging out of Windows 10 support. I’m glad to see slick distributions like this trying to fill that gap.

That said her requirements are _so_ simple that Debian with Chromium would probably satisfy 100% of her requirements which are ‘download documents from gmail and print them’.

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A chromebook or an ipad with a keyboard. Don’t over complicate it for her or anyone else. Give them something that makes what they know even easier, and also open up new avenues without having to learn a lot.

Ubuntu if it’s just an os replacement. She doesn’t know or care what debian or chromium is.

Snaps make Chromium worse than if on Debian or Mint.

I bought my mom a MacBook Air and put Brave on it. Brave, more than anything, fixed all of her problems (the shitty state of the web). I could have just as easily given her a good Linux laptop, I think.

Get her on a Mac if you can. I got my mum to switch to Mac from Windows over a decade ago and it’s been fantastic for both of us. Her support needs dropped from once every two months to once every few years, and she’s been able to do more with her computer than she would ever have attempted on Windows. She’s been using knitting software to make patterns to share and learnt how to use photoshop, all by herself. The computer just working and not breaking anytime she tried something was fantastic for her confidence in trying/learning new things.

No I don’t think I’ll spend a minimum of A$999 so she can use chrome and print things.

You can buy a refurbished M1 for half that, and it will be the best computer she ever had.

No I don’t think I’ll spend $499 on a second hand computer so she can change from using her current working computer for chrome and printing things.

Sounds like they're on the market for a new OS, not a new computer, which I think is the situation a lot of Windows 10 users are finding themselves in.

An iPad with a keyboard folio is generally even better for these kind of users. They can do everything they want and need, and the OS is uncomplicated. And of course never breaks.

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