I can't believe that some people here think that it is better to move your relatives, who are scared/prone to malware but don't think to restart their computer first, to Linux. What a joke really. Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.
My dad (>60, not exactly tech saavy) has been using Lubuntu for 2 years now (actually I don't even remember when we installed it might be 4 years :P). For many parents who only surf the web and do some non power user office (he uses Libre Office now) and check their mail it's the perfect solution.
For his use case it's more user friendly than the Windows install because of the lack of constant update requests and antivirus stuff etc. etc.
It's also faster on the same machine and the computer doesn't clog down every n month. I still remember that he asked me about 6 month in why the computer doesn't get slower :P
I'm fairly confident that a switch from Windows to macOS would have been a lot harder for him btw. Same for a switch to Windows 10 without making it look like the old Windows actually (not as confident in that statement as I don't know enough about Win10).
My problem with Linux is that more often than not, Linux failure mode is dumping the user to console, where even a power user might struggle to diagnose the problem. I've had failed kernel upgrades on Ubuntu where one moment you click "update all" in the package manager, and the next you are staring at terminal login screen. I haven't had a windows computer do that to me in years.
I've never had that happen on Ubuntu. Installing Ubuntu used to be quite technical unless you were lucky and everything worked out of the box, but even that is way less so today. Regardless, once Ubuntu is installed I never had issues.
yeah, people who know basically nothing aren't much of an issue, because they have no habits
The harder people to move over are ones who have ingrained certain things like "I need WinRAR to open this kind of file", and not being able to independently research for alternatives. People with mid-level computer experience, but not much experience in new environments suffer a lot on these transitions.
This! Well... not this! Every time the (linux) desktop discussion comes up, at least a few geeks have this "linux+my mother" argument which should prove linux desktop is totally usable for everyone. Just wait until they discover "alternative program X" for "windows program X" is not the same as the program they saw at the computer of the neughbours mom. Or libre office fucks up the layout again.
Come on guys, why always the linux + mother argument. Do not do it. It is silly.
Besides that: most of the time you probably have to give support on apps they use instead of os related issues.
So it is ok to generalize based on 0 cases that Linux will be too hard for older less tech-savvy people, but it is not ok to generalize based on 1-many successful cases that for some people it might work?
I agree that Linux might not be great for our parents. As for my own mother, I moved her to a Mac mini years ago and that has reduced my support time solely to explaining how specific websites work. She can do lots of things on her own now, like debugging the wifi (shitty telco router), she creates her own booklets for the classes she teaches, etc.
With windows she'd be stuck on non-task related issues 80% of the time, which made it impossible for her to learn how to use the computer at all.
Perhaps because my mother's use of a computer literally never ventures out of the web browser? A Chromebook would be great for her, but she does not have one. Instead she has a desktop that has been "linux + my mother" for 6 years.
It depends on the user, you can't make such a blanket statement and expect to be taken seriously.
My non-techie wife wandered onto my Elementary OS installation one day while I was at work, and despite having never used anything but Windows on the desktop (not even a Mac) she navigated just fine without me there to guide her. She was able to use it to go online, find something she wanted to print, print it, and then download, edit, and save a photo she wanted for her blog. Granted, those weren't pro-level tasks, but it's typical of what your average Grandma will do with her PC. Everything the average user does these days is all done in the browser; Google grokked that, and we now have Chrome OS.
I'd love to move my mother to Elementary (I've previously considered a Chromebook for her but my new stance on Google gives me pause) just so she will not be as susceptible to drive-by malware. I think if you give folks a fighting chance, you'll find that Windows doesn't have to be the only OS for Mr. and Mrs. Average User.
Users below the upper quartile (if we can model computer competence along a single axis) are coping just fine with a range of OSes on mobile devices including tablets - Android, iOS. People are getting used to working out slightly unfamiliar interfaces.
I think you are the one making a joke rather. The overall Linux experience (when you choose the right hardware and when everything works as expected) is not bad, really. It's faster than a machine running on any other system, USB peripherals do not need tons of external drivers, you can choose the Windows Manager you prefer out of a dozen of them available, it has proper package management, user management with different levels of privileges, it does not need to reboot for every update like windows does, I could go on forever.
At best you can criticize some Linux distros for being unfamiliar for Windows or OSX users, but that's about it. The rest depends a lot more on what you do with it. If whoever uses it lives mostly in a browser, it makes basically no difference.
About eight years ago I reinstalled my mother's laptop with Ubuntu (was WinXP). It was a mess before and I typically spent most of my time at my mom's actually with her laptop, trying to get it to decent speed and uninstalling miscellaneous crapware.
Since I installed Ubuntu on it I actually spend my time with her, not her computer. And she's happy about that, obviously, but also that her computer just works and she doesn't have to call me to get support all the time.
Likewise moved my Mum to Ubuntu about 10 years ago and it dramatically improved our relationship. Hasn't all been easy e.g. photo management has been a moving target but largely it's "just worked" during that time.
Same here for photo management - there is still no perfect solution so far. What did you end up using ? I am using a combination of Rapid Photo Downloader + Shotwell - not great, but it kind of works.
I am curious about this. From 2005-2008 my mother ran Ubuntu from an install that I set up and I have to say, it was delightful in terms of "very little IT support". The problem however was that she always seemed to feel like an outsider with her friends. Do you experience anything similar. Granted this timeframe was pre-smartphone and tablet, but I am curious none the less.
Well, sort of, but not really. My mom's best friend was really jealous of mom because her computer actually worked. The friend was running WinXP, experiencing all the typical problems. So my mom didn't feel like an outsider, more like she had the luxury situation.
A couple of years later Iphones and Android appeared, and as I'm an Android user she picked one of those (to simplify potential support situations) and was very happy about her decision. (Because she liked the phone, not that she was getting support from me all the time.)
I'm sure some of her friends have Iphones, but that's never really come up as a thing. Maybe because the people my mom associate with aren't 8 years old with the need to flaunt their stuff in the face of everybody claiming "look my phone is so cool, woop woop, your phone sucks because you have a different brand!". ;-)
That's one reason I bought stock android phones for my parents even if they don't care about stock android or not.
It's easier to tell them which setting to navigate to or what to tap looking at my phone since I too have a stock android phone.
How is it the least user-friendly? In Ubuntu, for example, nothing in regular use seems particularly different. My grandma started using it as her first OS at 84, and she’s still doing fine.
I'm commuter savvy and tried to get HBO Now to play on Ubuntu. Searched Google and found many different commands to try and run but had no luck. How could something so simple be so difficult?
Because it's not so simple. I have no experienced with HBO Now but similar services. And typically they use DRM like Microsoft Silverlight or the like to prevent people from playing videos without proper access.
The reason why such things are harder to get to work in Linux sometimes is because such DRM-solutions are not always baked in or provided by the same providers as in windows, and might be proprietary.
Also companies like Netflix have been known to filter peoples useragent leading to the exclusion of Linux users. nowadays it's as easy as installing a Silverlight-alternative in your favourite browser or just running a chrome derived browser.
my main point being: it's not always Linux's fault that some things are hard.
Of course that's correct, but we're talking about users that consider their device broken when an icon is not in its place. All they will perceive is "I cannot watch this video because Linux".
> we're talking about users that consider their device broken when an icon is not in its place
I wonder why such people exist at all? They do - reading the comments up to here I saw them mentioned four or five times. Yet the mindset such people supposedly display is totally incomprehensible to me. I can't for the life of me understand why would anyone, when faced with a problem, automatically give up without researching and trying to solve it. This is how I - and probably most of us on HN - learned "computers" in the first place: hours and hours of typing and clicking random things until something happens.
Aside from where do they come from, another question is if we really need to cater to them? Are they truly a majority of users? Is the condition in-born, uncurable, or can they be educated?
> That one quarter of the population can’t use a computer at all is the most serious element of the digital divide.
Frightening... but why?
> To a great extent, this problem is caused by computers still being much too complicated for many people.
Ok, but this doesn't answer my other question - is it possible to educate these people to use the current computers, or do computers really need to be streamlined that much?
I asked myself the same question when I saw a documentary about analphabets. They quoted a number of about 8 million total and functional analphabets for Germany (among 80 million population), which is absolutely staggering.
To witness, people who cannot use a computer are often called "digital analphabets" or similar.
> is it possible to educate these people to use the current computers[?]
Some can be taught, but not all of them.
There is a significant fraction of the population that simply can't "get" certain concepts in a usable form. These are the same folks that are only capable of solving an algebra problem by rote, don't see the difference between making a word bold & italic and doing it indirectly by applying a custom style, etc.
It is important to note that this doesn't have anything to do with a lack of intelligence. Many smart developers struggle in an analogous way with pointers and pointer arithmetic, for example. Some people's brains just don't easily bend very far in certain directions.
Then make them install a distribution preconfigured with these things. I'm quite sure distros like that are around, they were last time I checked for them like 5-10 years ago anyways.
I installed Ubuntu on my Dads laptop, and believe me, he had no troubles understanding and using it. Also never heard any complains from him about virus or system slowing down. Sooo good for me. :D
Canonical actually spent money on user interface testing. I can find some activity for Gnome shell but I'm having problems digging up any solid testing for KDE.
Usability people once came up with a brilliant observation about "spatial" and someone used that to argue that everytime you clicked on a folder in Gnome it should open in a new window.
Of course this made desktop a mess.
Many usability people also claim that it is good to have the menus attached to the top of the screen instead of attached to the window it affects.
Software recommended by usability people often have menus hidden away behind "gear" or "hamburger" icons.
I am not a usability expert but often I feel software is worse off after the ux people have had a say.
In particular it seems for many of them the goal is to mimic Mac OS X.
Remember that you are in the top decile of computer users if not in the 99th percentile.
Unity (Canonical's fork of Gnome Shell) perpetrates neither the 'spatial' filer nor the hamburger thing. Gnome Shell's Nautilus no longer uses 'spatial' presentation either - I recollect that Acorn RISC-OS used that metaphor.
I think that menus at top of screen made perfect sense in the days of screens with resolutions of 512 x 342 - I used a Mac LC - and on netbooks which is where Unity came from after all. On a large monitor they make a lot less sense I agree - huge trek to the top of the screen to click on stuff and the danger of a misplaced click on the way changing the menus.
I stopped using Unity for ages because of the way it broke the 'ALT-F' style mnemonics (Alt-IOF to insert a typeset equation in LibreOffice &c) but things have improved recently.
I find myself in the strange position of actually rather liking Gnome shell from Debian Wheezy onward (3.8)
say what you want, but my family (with no technological literacy to speak of) has been using the following distros with great success:
Linux Mint: my mother. two years since the switch and she loves it. can't say I don't either.
Arch Linux: my significant other. a year since she adopted it, and she can find her way around just fine.
FreeBSD: my father. with i3 and a couple of scripts, he's able to boot up into a single-use environment and do what he wants. very simple and easy and I don't have to touch his laptop for a long time.
so.. user friendly? user friendliness depends on the interface that you slap onto the front of the operating system. turns out, there are different UIs for different purposes!
and that's why linux is a good choice. underneath, it's secure, maintainable, and free. on top, it can look like anything you want, thanks to X and the various DE/WMs.
my mother needs a full-on Windows-like GUI, start menu and all. my SO needs a slim interface so she uses fluxbox, which with a click of her mouse has everything she needs in a convenient menu (plus workspaces), and my father doesn't need anything but a web browser.
the kernel doesn't matter to them if you dress it up nicely.
My mom is not a tech person. I have had her on linux for the past five years without any issues (asides the ones I caused myself when messing with things). She never updates it, and mostly uses it for photo editing and web access. I run updates when I am in town in case grub gets broken.
Linux runs better as a remotely administered machine than macos or windows, and can run photoshop cs2, unlike ios and chrome.
Anecdote, sure, but a data point none the less: my mother who is very untechnical and has zero patience for software errors loves using her computer again after I got Linux onto it. According to her, everything just works, and it runs faster to boot! This is someone who's spent decades in DOS, then Windows, then OS X.
I'm responsible for my sister, my mother, 6 coworkers and 13 friends running Arch on their hardware, in various personalized configurations that took me maybe 30 minutes each. I can push out updates and flag new software for installation within seconds if they ask me for it and so far, I have not had one serious complaint. Some use Libreoffice for their private stuff, some appstream Office directly into a X window. Oh you don't like GNOME? Let me install Xfce. It's perfect if certain use cases apply. My sister has had hers for 6 years and counting and only complains when she cant execute nickelback.mp3.exe.
Well, "We designed the WOW! Computer for seniors and baby boomers with little or no experience using computers."
And "The WOW! Computer runs on a Linux operating system we’ve customized to support our touch screen capabilities. We chose Linux to avoid frequent problems with viruses and to provide a more secure, problem-free computer environment. Linux has been developed over the last 20 years by numerous companies and currently runs on millions of computers. In fact, about 60% of all internet servers run Linux."
My father, sisters would disagree. I only had Linux on the home computer for last 7-8 years. There are absolutely no support requirements, because it keeps on working the same way with no surprises. They can not setup windows, macOS, linux by themselves, but once setup for them Linux is the most effective solution and least headache for me.
All of my computer science friends who have moved their parents to Linux (myself included) report that they are happily doing with their computers what they used to (sans downloading and running random malware) with much reduced "tech support".
Hell, when I introduced my mom to ubuntu ten years ago, Linux wasn't even as desktop friendly as it is now.
Not to say that it's the best choice, but it's plenty usable and user friendly.
Mine was using non-free applications too beforehand. You obviously would need to find ways that she can accomplish the same tasks as before without too much trouble.
Having said that, if she wanted a new computer right now, I'd probably recommend an iPad with a keyboard case (assuming that she can do what she wants with it, which I think she can -- most of her computer use nowadays is web browsing, email and the occasional word processing/spreadsheet. I use mine for everything except coding)
At the end of the day, its down to cost analysis: is it cheaper (in terms of time spent, for both of you) to leave things as they are and deal with support issues as they arise; or to retrain your mom to use something which has lower support overhead?
Tons of people have done it, and what the average non-technical user does is trivial on all of those operating systems. Anyway, Linux has half a dozen desktop UIs - referring to the user-friendliness of Linux as a unitary thing just makes it seem like you don't have a lot of experience in what you're criticizing.
edit: The best thing about Linux for non-technical people is that the GUIs don't change radically (for marketing purposes) every year or two. Once you get used to something, you can generally keep it, and changes and modernizations will accumulate slowly instead of forcing an adjustment all at once.
I moved three relatives who's computing skill vary between "What is a file, again? Help me, my Internet is gone?!!" and "How do I use this scanner to get that document into a PDF file and send it via Thunderbird?" over to Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE, 14.04). They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.
> They all dutifully do the upgrades and it's very rare that I have to intervene.
If you don't want to even worry about that, include a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade as a cron job and everything will be up to date without them doing anything.
You're not wrong, but just want to note that Ubuntu has a number of options in the graphical settings interface to control updates, including automatic installation of (either security, or all) updates.
My grandpa runs on Linux for 3 years. He understands how to open an email and how to send one, how to Google (mainly about cars) and how to send money. That's all he wants to know anyway.
He was scared about downloading viruses and all that, to which I told him: you don't need to worry about it.
I really don't see the difference, all of them provide icons to click to open apps that look roughly the same. It's just what your family member is used to. Anyone who grew up in KDE will find the Windows/MacOS UI a pain. But the fact is, Linux runs on as cheap hardware as Windows while being less or as prone to viruses/trojans as MacOS, so maybe it's worth a bit of a learning curve. Especially when you just use a browser, Ubuntu provides you with a 5 years unchanging UI... Compare that to Windows and what people are apparently willing to accept.
Just like others I installed Ubuntu on my mom laptop like 7 years ago. Transition was simple mainly because she was scared of computers all her life and different OS doesn't change much. All she need is some music CD playback, little of photo management and browser.
After many years the only problem ever occur was when she accepted upgrade proposal to Ubuntu 16.04 and then shortly after closed laptop so it's end up in half installed state. So it's would be smart not just setup unattended upgrades, but also disable all release upgrade suggestions.
Though I suppose for her ChromeOS could be enough too, but it's was too limited in offline mode and I not sure if she going to need new laptop anytime soon.
I'm fairly sure if I moved my parents to linux mint they wouldnt even notice. 'Usable' and 'user friendly' don't apply when all you use is chrome, and chrome is the same on every OS.
I installed linux on my grandmothers PC exactly because it is not usable. The webbrowser and email work fine (She already used thunderbird and firefox) but what destroyed the computer monthly is other family members that "helped" by installing "cleanup tools" and some ridiculous games that required hardware with shady drivers to unlock game content...
What most of home users need now is a browser and it works well on Linux too. I've installed Linux Mint for some of my family members and they are are doing fine. As a bonus, I don't have to clean their systems from tons of malware, crapware, countless browser bars and viruses anymore. A slightly bigger problem if a said person needs office programs, because going from MS Office to Libre/Open Office is still not straightforward for most users.
My mom had been using Linux for basic spreadsheet work and browsing. Yes, it needs setup and configuration; but that's true of any OS.
Also, Windows has annoying forced restarts and takes a long time to update. And it doesn't have a package manager. And drivers need to be annoying--needless waiting even for simple devices like a USB keyboard.
> Linux is good and all, but come on people, among iOS, MacOS, Windows, Chrome and Linux, it's the least usable and least user friendly.
ChromeOS is Linux. The principal difference between ChromeOS and Ubuntu is that if you want to run something other than Chrome then on Ubuntu you may and on ChromeOS you don't.
And the likes of Ubuntu have been easier to use than Windows for five years or more. The utility of Windows is if you need Windows-exclusive software or hardware, not that it's easier to use. And if that's your problem then you can't have ChromeOS or MacOS/iOS either.
You also can't lawfully install MacOS or iOS on the computers your family already has.
Linux hardware support is really good. Probably better than Windows and certainly better than macOS (which only has to support a very limited range of hardware).
I don't think you could call it better than Windows. A lot of wifi cards have issues, and my understanding is that printer support can be pretty bad too.
If you are using a Linux machine I'd still recommend that you double check for driver support on any hardware you buy. You can expect it to be okay but you should still check. You generally don't need to check for Windows, you can just assume and you will be right every time.
My experience with the last few printers I've bought is that with Ubuntu they've been recognised out of the box, while with Windows we've had to download massive driver packages from the manufacturer website before anything would work properly.
Haven't had a problem with wifi for a decade.
Double-checking for driver support is probably still worthwhile, but it's rare for it to be an issue these days, but I'd say it applies for Windows as well. Pretty much everything will have drivers for Windows, but their quality can be abysmal and you have require additional downloads.
> I don't think you could call it better than Windows.
It depends on the hardware. There is a lot of hardware that is still supported by Linux but has no drivers for any current Windows versions, because OEMs have no incentive to retroactively create drivers for new Windows versions for last year's hardware.
Win10 choked on my 7990 and an onboard NIC two or three months ago. Same machine with Linux Mint? Totally fine out of the box. After about 2007, I just stopped having hardware problems on Linux. I fully did not expect to start having hardware problems with plain jane hardware on later versions of Windows, though.
The only reason Linux has occasional issues with hardware support is because people install it on machines that were originally shipped with another OS. The OEM OS likely had all kinds of hardware problems but the manufacturer resolved them before shipping that particular configuration.
it is better out of the box. Go ahead and disconnect from the internet your computers, and do a simple A/B testing between Windows and a Linux distro and see how many can recognize your USB devices without installing anything. Linux wins hands down.
It's not the kernel which is at fault, but archaic software architecture. Eg. X11 and vsync tearing.
I was unable to fix it for two-monitor setups reliably in 4 years. It will not go away until Wayland is properly supporting nvidia, which might be another 5 years. So there is that.
It absolutely is not. There are constant driver failures on any Linux desktop. Your claim is completely baseless.
You literally have to find a "linux compatible" laptop, or else you risk running into constant driver problems. Not so with Windows, at least, and macOS comes on its own hardware.
