My mom has been a lifelong windows user and has not used any other operating systems before besides her iPad and iPhone, but she’s pretty good at figuring things out technology wise as far as I know, but still just wants her computer to just work.
After my mom finished using quickbooks and other windows hold only programs I recommended Linux to her especially since she was on windows 10 and couldn’t upgrade to 11.
I just installed Linux mint for her and got her all setup with all her files in the same place etc. I even cloned her windows 10 system and setup a virtual machine with her old system in case of an emergency she needs something that just doesn’t work on Linux or something we missed, it’s pretty slow due to running the VM from an HDD but I told her she shouldn’t need to use it except in some extreme circumstances.
Her use cases these days are looking through, saving photos from her phone, browsing the web, and some word processing / spreadsheets which I setup to have the tabbed view similar to Microsoft office. I also installed the Google Chrome flatpak for her so she can sync all her bookmarks, and such back onto her device.
I setup unattended upgrades and helped her verify all her peripherals and Bluetooth devices are working.
So far so good only hiccup seems to be she has some saved emails in .msg format which can’t be opened but I read I can convert those files into a readable format for her, worst case she can use the vm I setup.
I let her know I’m available for tech support whenever she needs if something comes up.
Looking for feedback on anything I may have missed or might want to tell her to ensure she has a good experience.
I bricked my mother’s computer (tried to create a USB backup, Windows 10 froze 80% through, cutting power corrupted the GPT partition table). She agreed to use Fedora Workstation on it so I tried to install it but it wouldn’t detect the drive after I ran basically every command in System Recovery Linux from a USB in an attempt to fix it.
We’ve concluded the laptop is done for. Thankfully I had just bought a used laptop for $40 (Toshiba Satelite Pro U500) that I had no actual use for (I just thought it was neat). Unfortunately it came with Windows 10 and unlike Windows 11, Windows 10 is good enough. I put the change to Linux on hold until after Windows 10 extended support ends in October next year.
I should really set up unattended updates on my own PC.
As for what you might have missed, as much as I hate GNOME it’s pretty solid for a casual user (especially from the Apple ecosystem). Not that it really matters. Also, you should go in and enable the firewall. Linux Mint for some reason installs with the firewall completely open by default IIRC.
you could try to swap the old ssd or hdd from the broken laptop if it’s otherwise decent enough. check if it has a 2.5" drive or m.2
It’s a 13 year old slim laptop with next to no repairability. Presumably it had an Nvme SSD.
Hmm you might want to check that SSD, nvme did not hit consumer laptops until 2015.
The laptop’s too slim for anything but nvme, and apparently it was top of the line for it’s time.
EDIT: Apparently they nvme was preceeded by PCI-E SSD’s, so I’ll just go with that.