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?
It has been my experience that you can just forget about disk space usage when sysadmin-ing an old person.
The olds that I’ve set up with computers basically don’t move in. They go to a couple websites. They don’t create files, they don’t install a lot of software, they aren’t playing all 500GB of Red Dead Redemption 2. Like, I’ve gotten ready to move files across, prepared full on network connections or brought large external SSDs to transfer files from one computer to another or to copy them off of Windows to copy them back on with Linux…half a gig of pictures, maybe.
We’re talking about folks who might not install any software on the computer at all because they live in a browser.