[incognito124]

My non-technical friend installed linux on her 10yo old laptop by herself after a windows update slowed down her device and rendered it unusable. She said she said she read about it somewhere and that the Ubuntu installation was pretty intuitive.

I was both amazed and proud. She's daily driving Linux now

(to be fair, it's just tv shows and web apps like chatgpt or docs, but still, Linux is now a good-enough alternative, at least anegdotally)

[naishoya]

My late grandfather (passed in 2022 at the age of 104) showed us all how it could be done. In 2014! During one of my infrequent visits to his house; he was complaining about the state of the latest Windows installation on his new laptop, and saw me driving Debian+KDE and asked about switching.

I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.

A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.

He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.

Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."

In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.

Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.

[eudamoniac]

I've coached a few normies through a Linux installation and there are always 3 things that confuse them and it never improves.

1. Understanding they have to back up their current hard drive somehow. What even is a back up? How do they do it? What do they need to back up? How does it get restored? I tell them to put their important files on a flash drive, but it's not obvious.

2. How to boot into the flash drive with the Linux image on it, and what that even means. The instructions for this are usually sparse because every laptop enters BIOS with a different key and has a different way of choosing the boot device from there.

3. The disk configuration in the installer. They have no idea what to do here. There is usually not a simple default with friendly text to click through. It's impossible to write coherent instructions for this if the user doesn't understand what a drive even is, conceptually.

[alex1138]

There's some funky things like drivers etc but on the whole switching to Linux is probably even easier for Kathy and Wayne (sorry, Alice and Bob) because the updates won't randomly break like MS's do

[barbs]

My Dad, who's well into his 60s, managed to install linux himself on his computer. His kept the windows partition in a dual boot setup just in case, but spends just about all the time in Linux, he loves it.

[b112]

anecdotally?

[incognito124]

Yes, thank you. It's 'c' in English but 'g' in my mother tongue

[resize2996]

I thought they were making fun of my new jersey accent.

[plagiarist]

AFAICT the only thing that should be keeping people from Linux nowadays is gaming (especially VR) and systemd doing dumb shit device naming so that changing the physical location of an unrelated GPU renames your NIC and breaks your internet.

[flipthefrog]

Would have switched years ago if it wasn't for Adobe. Open source equivalents to Photoshop and Lightroom are NOT viable alternatives

[jasomill]

I was under the impression that the systemd device naming schemes were created specifically to solve the problem you describe[1].

Are there cases where the old scheme worked well that none of the systemd schemes properly address?

Is the scheme Windows uses to bind configuration to physical network interfaces even documented?

[1] https://systemd.io/PREDICTABLE_INTERFACE_NAMES/

[graynk]

ALVR has been working really well for me on my Quest 3.

there are a lot of other things stopping people from migrating besides gaming though. sure, there are alternatives for professional audio/photo/video editing/producing, but they all mean losing some functionality if you migrate.

[throwaway1389z]

Don't use NIC name for networking. This is a none problem.