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.