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.
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I think Mint does this out of the box, but check if Timeshift is set up for automatic backups. It’s meant for system-level snapshots (basically everything outside the HOME-folder), so you can easily revert if an update or something breaks the system.
Also consider some form of periodic external backup of her files and documents in the home folder, to protect against hardware failure.
I setup time shift, but I should setup some kind of backup for her. She didn’t have any kind of backup in windows either.
My mom’s laptop just physically broke and is unrepairable, so I don’t have to do the whole thing you did for yours.
I’m a little bit relieved, because I’m not sure I love my mom as much as you do…
I’m available for tech support whenever she needs
I was already available for her tech support whenever she needed so this isn’t really changing much for me. Plus I enjoy this so it doesn’t bother me.
Well I would not enable auto updates to not get any random problems which can happen sometimes
About msg format https://support.mozilla.org/ru/questions/1257035 Thunderbird can handle them
Also thanks for the info on the .msg files! We tried opening in thunderbird but it didn’t work, we’ll try these steps seems simple!
I thought it would be good to enable this to ensure security issues are patched. But maybe I should turn that off?
Well updates installs not only security patches but also new features and there always possibly that something would break,so better if u would do upgrade urself manually
Hmm maybe I can see if it can be configured to only do security patches and feature updates can be done manually.
You can still go auto-update way but setup something like Timeshift, so if something breaks you can just roll the backup and boot regularly.
Can’t speak for Quickbooks, but Quicken works fine in WINE; you can set up a shell script in ~/Desktop to start it, so it works just like on Windows. Quicken (and 20 years of fin data) was one of the last things holding me to Windows, and getting it transferred to linux was hugely liberating.
I’d look into potentially setting up Winboat or Winapps on her machine. would make using Windows stuff slightly easier as opposed to having to keep opening up a VM.
My goal here is for her NOT to use the VM. I only set it up as a backup in case there was something I overlooked. Ideally she’ll never need to go into the VM.
You know who else let her know they’re available for tech support?
.....
MY MOM!
I did the same thing for my parents but used Zorin. Very similar to windows 10/11 and haven’t needed to use terminal at all. 100% would recommend
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.
Nice - I’ve done a similar thing for my mom, except she was transitioning from macOS (but had used Windows a lot previously for work). So far she has had a package conflict that broke the package system (Signal was installed from their PPA) which raised a rather ominous error message for her (“Your package system is broken”). I could fix it easily as I had set up VNC via SSH, and that worked as expected first time I needed it, but it’s not something she would be able to do by herself. And I still haven’t installed Singal in a way that won’t break things later yet…
She still uses her old Macbook on and off, and there are some things she only has access through that machine. I want to set up better cross platform solutions for her. Especially file sync and images needs to be fixed, but I’ve not landed on a way to do that. I could set her up with an account on my Nextcloud, but I don’t like having access to her files and I also would not want to be liable for her files disappearing. Same with images. I use Nextcloud for images myself, have thought of setting up Immich. But same thing here, don’t really want to have access to her stuff (not sure if Immich can be set up to be E2EE?)
You should install Signal as Flatpak. It should be available through the app store if you are on Mint. Otherwise see https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.signal.Signal
Do not consult companies websites for how to install on Linux if you can avoid it, they will nearly always break your setup. Just head for the app store and click the big green button.
Install signal in distrobox or in flatpak,simple synch go with synthing
