this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Wipe the operating system entirely and reinstall it from scratch. That would do a lot of it. And if the only thing she's really going to do is browse the internet, you might consider installing mint instead.
Linux Mint is good for beginners. If Windows is a necessity, use the Chris Titus WinUtil script to configure and remove bloat.
No, it isn't.
I say this as someone who had their first UNIX class 35 years ago, and having been in IT since 1994.
I've run it as a test - to see how viable it is for family and friends. It has a LOT of usability issues for newcomers.
Power management is non-existant out of the box-as in it will keep right on running until the battery is dead.
Too many things require command-line management, e.g. that stupid printer notification thing that's on by default.
The default UI stuff is as bad as Windows is - the crap color choices mean one window is hard to distinguish from another. And to change it requires...editing text files. What is this, 1992?
Then the lack of software. No, Open/Libre office is not the same as MS Office. Just try to open an excel spreadsheet on Libre or Open and see what happens. Or anything more than the simplest Word doc.
Then there's no Publisher, no OneNote.
Sure, some of this is use-case, but how do you know that use-case won't show up in 6 months?
And really pity the power user who needs to remote into other machines. Now they gotta install VNC or RDP. Which one? OK, Remina seems like the VNC/RDP client of choice, again, which one? The descriptions in the repo say very little about what makes them different. OK, fine, I'll use this one. Now setup an RDP connection, only to find it won't connect, some kind of security error with TLS. OK, t-shoot a TLS error. Ah, they've deprecated TLS 1. Fine, reinstall TLS 1. Still no go. Wait, why is an RDP connection failing for TLS, it doesn't use TLS. Oh, choosing RDP in Remina doesn't change the security type to RDP. WTF?
OK, now that's fixed, I need to connect to a user machine to support them. What do I use since there's no remote control by default, unlike Windows, where at most you walk them through clicking ~~one~~ two checkboxes to allow inbound RDP. Now I gotta walk a user through installing a VNC server, and all that entails. Great.
Oh, your Logitech wireless mouse doesn't work out of the gate? Let's Google that. Oh, You gotta go install this software someone wrote so a wireless mouse can work. A mouse that has worked out of the box on Windows since ~2005.
On and on the merry-go-round goes. With Windows, that ride mostly stopped with Win2k in 1999, even more so with XP.
Sorry, as much as I'd like to see "The Year of the Linux Desktop", it's still a long way off. Distros like Mint are really impressive, but I won't be installing it for any family, because the support effort is still way too high.
This is a very accurate description of what I've experienced with Linux as well. Sometimes things just work out the box, but some things are not worth the hassle, which is why I'm back on Windows after having used Linux as a daily driver for years.