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?
I did this for my dad, and then his neighbour… and then his other neighbours… also for quite a few older people near where I live.
Anyway, assuming the initial setup goes okay with wifi/printers etc and all the software is present, then it’s pretty much hands-off most of the time - though they’ll likely have 100 tiny questions initially, none of which they feel are “worth troubling you with” - so you may need to nudge them every few weeks a few times, and if possible go over and check things yourself.
There may be a sense of not wanting to bother you, or embarrassment about a mistake, then they just put up with it - for example, accidentally zooming in in the file browser, so all the files are massive, then just putting up with it instead of “bothering you”.
Any solving you do, you can show them where you find the answer/option e.g. teaching them to search the mint forums - but also knowing the Ubuntu ones will mostly work too (and for some things, any Linux ones).
You’ll need to remind them about updating, because it’s not forced on them, and if they’re prevously Windows/Mac users, they may distrust updates. You may also need to be on hand for version upgrades, at least in the first year, depending on how computer-literate they were previously.
It’s worth setting up some sort of backup with them, and setting up autosaves for office programs - then making symlink shortcuts to where those autosaves are kept. Generally you’re looking for ways to undo the panic if things go wrong - “here’s how to reverse it if you lose it/break it”.
Assuming you’re putting an adblocker on, you will probably need to show them how to update it and how to disable it if absolutely required by a website.
Check there’s something in place to transfer photos from their phone/camera etc - or any other use case where they want to transfer things on/off the computer - this might include things like “Calibre” for ebooks, or “Shotwell” for photos for instance.
Other than that… depends on the specific person and what they’re doing.
Generally though, Mint is pretty intuitive, especially if they used older Windowses - so you may find (as I did) there’s almost no support needed once it’s up and running.