Welp… My mom is apparently done with windows (yay!) Anf wants me to move her laptop to Linux (oh nooo). I personally use Ubuntu studios but im not sure what to get for her. She is getting her masters in nursing online so it def needs to be able to accommodate that. Do y’all have any suggestions on where to start? TIA
Depends from her hardware but generally Linux mint I install for everyone who is not familiar at all with linux.
She is getting her masters in nursing online so it def needs to be able to accommodate that
Is there any specialist software she needs, or is it browser based?
Most important question.
Also try to transition her slowly from outlook -> Thunderbird and chrome -> firefox and so on. Then after a few weeks at least do the switch to linux mint. Then the shock of all the new things is smaller
I got 2 weeks for her break to change it, get it fine tuned and teach her enough to not fail instantly. Thankfully shes pretty good with computers but has never changed an OS like this.
Are you able to make sure the course doesn’t have any weird specific browser things? I hope nobody uses IE stuff anymore and Edge is Chromium based now so maybe that’s not a concern like it used to be.
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+1
uBlue Bluefin or Aurora. Tested and approved. I moved my dad on Bluefin one year ago, no issues, it just works for his use case (90% of the time in a browser, light photo editing in Krita, some text editing). No maintenance, no updates, no actual knowledge needed as a daily user, just a single reboot once a week to boot the freshest system image.
And more importantly, it keeps on working despite his talent for fucking up every single piece of software he lays his hands on.
I’ve never heard of these. Which is not a bad thing, but I wouldn’t recommend for beginers
You’ve never heard of atomic/immutable distros? You’re part of the lucky 10,000 ;)
Bluefin, Aurora and their much more popular sister Bazzite are part of the universalBlue project: a delivery pipeline that lets anyone build their own, maintenance free atomic distro.
All uBlue projects are 100% based on Fedora Silverblue, itself an atomic distro based on Fedora. Which means that uBlue projects get automatic weekly upgrades just like Silverblue.
For people not familiar with Linux, and people who don’t want to spend any time maintaining their OS (HTPC, gaming rig etc), it’s amazing.
This sounds perfect! She needs to be able to do PowerPoint, videos, online streaming for class and tons of research and papers to write. Thank you so much!
mint would be better for new users easily
why not kionote / silverblue instead which are actually from fedora?
There are a lot of QoL improvements on uBlue projects that make them much more usable as daily drivers, like hardware accelerated codecs from rpmfusion, nvidia drivers for those who need them or actually useful preinstalled software. Plus some minor improvements on defaults.
+1 for uBlue. I did the same for my mother on her laptop and desktop PC for office work. Chose Aurora in this case. Setting system and flatpak updates to automatic means I hopefully never have to look after these systems again as the distro maintainers basically do the maintenance. Setting up Secure Boot with the shim/MOK method and TPM auto-unlocking for full disk encryption using the
ujustscripts is a breeze as well.+1 for Bluefin or Aurora. I daily this and I love how boring it is and haven’t broken after an update.
Did you have any problems with Aurora? I thought it would be perfect for my parent. But ran like a dog on their laptop and could work out why. Tried Mint instead and it just worked out of the box.
Another vote for Mint.
Mint is one of the best options for your mom. People switching from Windows to Linux are their main target if I remember correctly
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I moved my mother to Mint a few months ago. I have not had a single tech support call. She uses it daily. About a week in I asked her how it was going. She liked that printing worked more reliably and wished the scroll bars in Facebook were a bit thicker. Her printer used to show as offline sometimes in Windows but that issue has gone away under Mint. I was going to look for a theme with thicker scroll bars but she told me not to bother.
Granted she was a Firefox and Thunderbird user already so that helped with the transition.
Linux Mint.
Zorin or Mint.
Zorin is a bit more dumbed down, so there is no way for normal people to do anything wrong and a lot of things work just like they would expect them to. What really shocked me is when my dad downloaded some exe from the internet, double clicked it, installed and ran the software… No other distro supports that I think. On the other hand, when he had a specific wish, there was no way to change that, even though there are other distros/de’s where I know you can. You mostly have to take it as it is given. Streamlined might be the appropriate word.
But mint is also very good for people that come from windows. No personal experience with it though.
Personally I prefer KDE over what my other two suggestions offer, but I’ve noticed that there is a lot of fiddling around involved when setting it up for specific personal preferences. If I do a fresh install, I have to go through all the kde apps and into their settings and change some behaviour here and there, which takes a whole weekend. I don’t like the defaults, but at least everything can be configured to nearly perfectly suit me. But I would not want to do that for a relative, who is not tech-savy and patient enough to do it thenselves. Thats like a constant part-time tech support job.
wine is literally in every distro’s repos.
Thats not the point.
if you haven’t tried mint you should. I had similar opinions about kde neon that you seem to have about Zorin, but I’ve completely dropped recommending neon because mint is just insanely well curated.
I’ve got Zorin on an old laptop and it is definitely easy. I’m going to try that .exe thing!
Linux Mint is so nice.
I would turn off “Secure Boot” in BIOS before doing the upgrade.
It officially works, but can throw in unnecessary challenges - and Mom probably isn’t traveling with national secrets next week anyway.
i use mint as my first and im planning to get my mum on it too. its super user friendly
My mom was not interested in the surface cause she only need Mail, Browser, Whatsapp web and here Background image. So she used Ubuntu with the side bar as good as with Mint. Same goes for gmy Granny. I propose, Ask what possibilities are important for here - Do not ask about Application - and show here afther that where to do things.
For showing the new PC. Do it with some work she has to do. Learning curve is way better thatway.
Ubuntu. Simply because you use it as well. You will be the primary tech support. So something that you are familiar with is important.
If her router supports it I would set up a VPN and ssh on her computer so that you can help her. Maybe RDP or Sunshine/Moonlight as well.
Yeah I’m really surprised people are suggesting things other than that. The value of being able to exactly see what she does on her screen on your own and describe things you do on yours that you know you do will be very useful.
My suggestion is to install Ubuntu with whatever desktop environment works for her. Since you’re using Ubuntu too, and you’re essentially going to be her tech support, it’ll just be easier all around to stay on the same distro at least for now.
More importantly, how Windows-centric is she? Some people may prefer Gnome since using it is just a bit less complicated to use without needing to set a bunch of different settings. But if she’s expecting the Windows style start menus and such then maybe she’ll prefer KDE. Or there’s always installing Linux Mint’s Cinnamon on Ubuntu, Cinnamon would be easier than KDE for a ex-Windows user I suspect (https://ubuntucinnamon.org/ also exists apparently).
Linux Mint Debian!
