I’m visiting my parents for the holidays and convinced them to let me switch them to Linux.
They use their computer for the typical basic stuff; email, YouTube, Word, Facebook, and occasionally printing/scanning.
I promised my mom that everything would look the same and work the same. I used Linux Mint and customized the theme to look like Windows 10. I even replaced the Mint “Start” button with the Windows logo.
So far they like it and everything runs great. Plus it’s snappier now that Windows isn’t hogging all the system resources.
set up some remote desktop in case you need to support them when your vacation ends
Already threw RustDesk on there and tested it.
I did this about a decade ago for my parents. Upgraded their computer last year and they told me they wanted to keep Linux on the new machine.
My dad wasn’t convinced until his hoyle card games ran with wine though.
@OP, can you advise what themes etc you used to make it look like windows 7?
I’m about to switch one of my parents over, I think that would make the transition easier.
I can’t remember the exact name for the themes I used, but if your go into the Linux Mint theming section and search “Windows” you will get several results.
I don’t know if there is a Windows 7 theme specifically, you would have to look for that yourself. I also did little things like allign and resize their desktop icons the same way their Windows desktop looked. I changed the default folder colors to a tan-ish color to look similar to the Windows folder colors. My mom could tell it looked different, but it was close enough.
Making their app icons look the same and be in the same rough location as their Windows machine is probably the most important. My Mom loves the Spotify desktop app, so I made sure to install it from the software center and pin the icon into the taskbar right where she was used to seeing it.
Make sure their browser home page is set the same too, and any bookmarks they have.
Also, guide them through the new install. Have them click through all the typical tasks they do. I had my mom sit with me and showed her how Spotify opened up and looked exactly the same as it did on her Windows install. We played some music and I showed her how to adjust the little volume knob in the Mint toolbar. I had her print some documents, browse the web, look at pictures and videos she had saved on her drive, stuff like that.
That will make them feel much more comfortable with the change. There is a balance between trying to get everything to look identical, and helping your parents become comfortable with something new.
It’s so funny that having a different theme makes the computer hard to use for some parents. :)
Those people drive cars on the road!
UI/UX 101, my friend.
If people are used to see specific symbols for years is hard for them to use different ones.
There’s a reason why floppy disk is still the icon for “save”.
Those people drive cars on the road!
Imagine if they change all road signs designs suddenly before you go for a ride.
I wish linux was my parents.
I wish I had a linux
Good job on that! Linux is way better for average uses like you described. 😊
An excellent choice to use Linux Mint! If my parents allowed me to switch their computers to Linux, I would’ve chosen Linux Mint as well for them. But, I probably wouldn’t give them the Windows 10 look.
I did that about 10 years ago because I got tired of removing malware for them. They haven’t had any malware since then.
Same here. Not just my parents, but also some of my aunts and uncles. None of them are particularly tech savvy and none of them have had any major issues.
People who claim that Linux is difficult to use, or not suitable for newbies, have no idea what they’re talking about.
Linux just needs to come preinstalled.
People, stop buying windows stuff and then installing linux! Buy Linux: https://linuxpreloaded.com/
I gave my mom a macbook with debian KDE and a mac OS theme… I dont think she’s noticed yet…
I did the same thing with my Dad. He’s been using Linux Mint for a bit over 2 years now.
Linux Mint is more than enough for his usage: Email, internet browsing and word processing.
Recommending Linux is good; forcing it down someone’s throat is not.
If parents are just comfy using Windows, it’ll get them super frustrated when they’ll face new issues coming from Linux use, as you just can’t turn Linux into Windows and they never asked for it.
Now, if they complain about all the shit Windows throws at them, you can offer an alternative.
I see what you’re saying, but it has gone down fine so far. My dad is completely computer-illiterate, every phone/computer he uses seems like it was found in an alien spacecraft to him, so changing from Windows to Linux doesn’t make any difference to him. He just needs to be able to click the Chrome icon and then click the YouTube favorite button or the Hotmail favorite button.
My mom worked way back in the day for a corpo that used DOS systems, so she actually has remained slightly computer savvy. She was worried about the change until I showed her that the Spotify app worked perfectly, she could read her emails, open Word documents, and print stuff.
I also explained that the computer would run faster and would be safer for them to use because the malware that effects Windows doesn’t effect Linux, and that made sense to her.
If she had insisted I keep them on Windows, I would have. But she was just concerned that nothing would work the same and she would have to become some techie to figure it out. Once I addressed those concerns, she was alright with switching.
Master…please teach me your ways.
Just uninstall your proprietary parent and install Linux.
Not worth it. You will end up playing the h support when something goes wrong.
I set up Mint on my parent’s PC a couple of years ago, and the amount of support I have had to provide has dropped to basically zero.
Typically all of us who switched our relatives to Linux were doing support anyway — but it’s much easier than Windows.
Windows needs constant handholding like a needy pet (and not the cute kind). With Linux I spend extended periods of time without having to do anything. I get like one major issue a year, and it’s usually hardware related. The only questions I get occasionally are “do you know an app that does thing”.
My parents would ask me for tech support anyway no matter the OS. I have them update software and update Firefox and Chromium and their Netflixing will keep working, been very low stress generally.
As if I’m not already doing that. Why do you think I was home working on my parent’s computer in the first place?
Plus with how shitty Windows is getting, I’ll likely be doing less tech support going forward.
Make me use windows and I will write a similar blog post about me hating every second of it. But I don’t have to, so I won’t.
The part about dragging and dropping files like its the 90s, instead of just pushing to your git repo was funny.
Cmon, this isn’t a compatible and good enough alternative:
It is something that will just give you issues down the line when people expect documents to look consistent.
Firstly, there’s no guarantee that a document would look exactly the same even within different versions of MS Office itself. Also, try opening any complex document in MS Office on macOS for instance, and you’ll most likely notice issues or differences compared to the Windows version. In my old sysadmin job, where I used a Mac, we had a standard “change control” template that we had to fill out when doing infrastructure changes, and the radio buttons used in the form didn’t work on the macOS version of Office. So issues like this are pretty common. These sort of issues are why people either normally ignore them OR in the case that layout/formatting is critical (eg: for publishing/printing), then they’d use PDF or TeX or similar formats, where the formatting is preserved.
Secondly, as @cygnus@lemmy.ca mentioned, use OnlyOffice if MSO compatibility is important. Below is a screenshot I captured of a recreated Lorem Ipsum docx on my Linux machine, with MS Office Online (running on Edge) on the left and OnlyOffice on the right.
As you can see, they’re virtually identical - and any difference in the sizing etc would come down to the fact that I’m running the web version of MSO, so the zoom/scaling may not exactly match that of OO. But other than that, if you check the spacing and everything else, it’s pretty accurate.
Finally, in saying that, even OO has it’s limitations and isn’t a 100% replacement for MSO - as it can’t run macros, or may not be able to display certain types of embedded objects in Excel and so on. But then, even the web and Mac versions of MS Office has these sort of limitations. But the average home user wouldn’t normally use macros or advanced features in Office, so for the most part, OO, or even LO should be fine for most users.
Also, just as a reminder, in this thread we’re discussing about how Linux can work fine for most home users, the kind of users who have simple requirements, and aren’t dependent on specific proprietary programs like Photoshop etc. Obviously Linux will not be suitable for every single need or use case out there, but neither is Windows or MacOS - if you have special needs or requirements, then use the tool that’s best for the job. But nitpicking minor differences like this isn’t helping anyone, we’d be sitting here arguing all day about how “X OS sucks because it can’t do Y”, which is a pointless exercise.
Edit: I was curious to see how bad LibreOffice actually was so I just tested it out:
… and that was surprisingly not bad at all! Just one word out of place. But this goes to show how opensource software is ever evolving and constantly improving - so a particular criticisms you may have had in the past may no longer be applicable, unless you test it out yourself against the latest versions.
On my print with version 7.6 it wasn’t just a word out of place. I noticed you’re opening a DOCX and even if it looks better than what I showed it is useless. LibreOffice refuses to save in DOCX meaning I can’t edit documents.
Not improving at all, you just did the wrong test :P
Um… that’s NOT a refusal, it’s just a warning. Clicking on that highlighted button will save the DOCX.
To not get the warning again, all you have to do is untick the checkbox which says “ask when not saving on ODF” - it’s there right in your screenshot.
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This article seems misguided, people pick their OS because of what they need. I can list many things with subpar experience on Windows: emacs suck; latex is slow; libreoffice and thunderbird crashes like nobody’s bushiness; opam is straightup unsupported (which means ocaml, dune, coq is a pain); there is absolutely nothing in the app store, means that people will need to resort to commandline tools to install and update app.
All of this obviously will not decrown Windows from a OS with mass appeal. Since the software most people need runs well on windows.
Another example, in my crowd it is quite rude to send a docx file between people assuming people want to use or have access to Microsoft office, so everything is in PDF. Yet in many other crowd docx is the default. We were never bounded by the need of a specific office software, while others do not enjoy the same luxury.
There is needs by different groups of people, and that means they choose the OS that is most comfortable for them. Linux is not going to have 70% desktop adoption rate overnight, and no one is saying that. In fact both the quote in the article and this post explicitly dismissed “linux is ready for everyone” delusion. They are just comfortable in Linux, and what is wrong with that?
In 99% of cases I have seen, people pick their OS because it came preinstalled
Well the article lists at least 8 groups of people with real and common professions that can’t run on Linux because it wont cut it.
Linux is not going to have 70% desktop adoption rate overnight, and no one is saying that. In fact both the quote in the article and this post explicitly dismissed “linux is ready for everyone” delusion. They are just comfortable in Linux, and what is wrong with that?
Yeah, Linux isn’t for everyone yet people here on Lemmy defend it like a religion.
