When I was visiting my wife’s family for Thanksgiving, my father-in-law told me that his laptop was telling him that if he didn’t upgrade to Win11 he be vulnerable to all sorts of malware. They’re both retired and on a fixed income so he was panicking over buying a new machine. I put Mint on his existing laptop and walked him through its use. Fingers crossed that he’ll be able to handle it. I haven’t had any support calls from him yet but I’ll find out how it’s going when I see him in a few days.

Does anyone have any tips for supporting older family members on Linux if they have absolutely no experience with it?

  • BakedCatboy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    23 days ago

    I did this for my parents, context: borderline elderly, late 60s, use their laptops for checking email, reading articles, and watching youtube. I visit every year or so and usually end up doing a little maintenance.

    Probably my main tips are:

    • Don’t pick elementary like I did years ago, I learned there’s no upgrade path between major versions and that’s been a pain
    • I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates
    • Set up some form of remote access, I’ve used teamviewer but in hindsight it would be nice to have WG to SSH in
    • If I were doing it again today, I would probably use a universal blue spin for the atomic updates
    • With my parents’ level of computer experience, as long as there’s a firefox icon in the dock then they’re right at home

    Honestly there isn’t much to it, especially if they’re not tech savvy and aren’t doing anything complex. All you have to do is make sure familiar app icons are where they expect and that they know how to use the window decorations / DE. My only pain has been having to do a bunch of updates when I visit, so next time I’ll swap them to fedora and set up automatic atomic updates. Besides that, everything keeps chugging along because they’re not making any changes to the system when I’m not there.