When I was visiting my wife’s family for Thanksgiving, my father-in-law told me that his laptop was telling him that if he didn’t upgrade to Win11 he be vulnerable to all sorts of malware. They’re both retired and on a fixed income so he was panicking over buying a new machine. I put Mint on his existing laptop and walked him through its use. Fingers crossed that he’ll be able to handle it. I haven’t had any support calls from him yet but I’ll find out how it’s going when I see him in a few days.

Does anyone have any tips for supporting older family members on Linux if they have absolutely no experience with it?

  • BakedCatboy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    23·
    1 day ago

    I did this for my parents, context: borderline elderly, late 60s, use their laptops for checking email, reading articles, and watching youtube. I visit every year or so and usually end up doing a little maintenance.

    Probably my main tips are:

    • Don’t pick elementary like I did years ago, I learned there’s no upgrade path between major versions and that’s been a pain
    • I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates
    • Set up some form of remote access, I’ve used teamviewer but in hindsight it would be nice to have WG to SSH in
    • If I were doing it again today, I would probably use a universal blue spin for the atomic updates
    • With my parents’ level of computer experience, as long as there’s a firefox icon in the dock then they’re right at home

    Honestly there isn’t much to it, especially if they’re not tech savvy and aren’t doing anything complex. All you have to do is make sure familiar app icons are where they expect and that they know how to use the window decorations / DE. My only pain has been having to do a bunch of updates when I visit, so next time I’ll swap them to fedora and set up automatic atomic updates. Besides that, everything keeps chugging along because they’re not making any changes to the system when I’m not there.

    • netvor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      24 hours ago

      I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates

      But doesn’t it eat all disk space? And don’t flatpak apps tend to proliferate dependencies on outdated stuff? From my experience (and that’s just maybe dozen of apps that simply don’t exist in the distro) when running flatpak update i always get deprecation warnings about some platform flatpaks that some of the apps depend on. And given that everything is few hundreds of megs, sigh…

      That’s why I like distros like Debian: there’s always strong pressure for apps to converge towards newer versions of libs/frameworks. Sure, it takes work to maintain but IMHO it’s worth it: once the app is in, you know it’s playing nice at least to that extent. AFAIK one of Flatpak’s core features is to lower the barrier by allowing multiple dependencies co-existing and thus removing that pressure, but that’s when the mess is inevitable.

      Sorry for the rant.

      • BakedCatboy@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        23 hours ago

        I mean you’re not wrong it’s true to a degree, but especially in my parents case, they hardly store anything on the computer so the disk usage hardly registers on the pros and cons. If it provides convenience then it’s whatever. They’re still on an obsolete elementaryos but flatpak is still keeping them up to date until I can get around to visiting them again. If I understand how it works on debianland once a major version goes EOL, they’d be using backports which might not have the latest version right?

        • netvor@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          21 hours ago

          point taken. I see how it can be a good balance of pros/cons.

          re: debianland, i’m not sure i understand the question so…

          Certain major version of a “traditional distro”, say debian 13 provides fixed list of libraries and apps (which get updated during the lifetime but only to necessary extent). each of those can only depend on a particular version selected by debian. eg. if for libfoo, the provided version is libfoo-1.2, then anyone who depends on libfoo must depend on libfoo-1.2. (if that can’t be achieved before release then that package is simply removed.)

          note that two versions of the same package can’t co-exist on the same system. (this is basically true for debianland and fedoraland; because packages share the same filesystem it would be not feasible to make it work without huge amount of added complexity and bug surface. definitely not on a distro-wide level).

          honestly i’ve never used backports; I don’t know what process they use to select versions; i would assume that it’s basically on a best effort basis.

          personally if i don’t find the stable version new enough, I look for vendor repo, appimage or flatpak (roughly in that order)

    • sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      21 hours ago

      I did a similar thing and did put them with Kinoite. My dad has had only a handful of concerns, most of which are related to the transition and learning. His system has worked great with no real issues. I think once an update failed but after a reboot it proceeded just fine.

      Plasma is so modern, Fedora is so smooth, atomic is great for this purpose, fingerprint scanner works, touchscreen works, the boot splash screen looks pretty, the list goes on