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?
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I have Mint installed on my Aunt’s laptop, which she basically never uses. Fun thing I learned: APT can get constipated if it doesn’t run in a few months. It got itself somewhere you couldn’t GUI out of so I had to use the terminal. It needed something like an apt clean or an apt --fix-broken or something, the error message it gave me told me what command to run, but that needed to happen.
I’ve made good experiences with RustDesk as an open source alternative to TeamViewer. Note the ID, set it up with a permanent password and you’ll have easy access without painful OTPs.
have tailscale installed on their machine, and ssh/vnc(x0vncserver or x11vnc) daemon running on it. when they call you for help you can just login directly and navigate them through stuff.
I set up VNC to only allow connections from localhost on my mother’s computer, and then forward the required port via SSH when I need to connect. SSH is set up to only allow public key authentication. Works quite well
You don’t need tailscale and honestly you should not use it unless you actually need it.
Put an icon for rustdesk on the desktop. Tell them if they ever need your help that’s how you can remote in to fix it. Only run it when you need remote access.
Never ever set up auto launching remote connections or tunnels that aren’t actually needed. You will create more security problems than you solve.
While I appriciate the security concers of having a “back door”(tailscale), having an icon for a support app for non techy elderly is also a security risk. That being said I use both for supporting my elderly mother. Having tailscale can be a lifesaver if she says the screen is black or she has no mouse. I can ssh in and check for hardware issues on remote restart.
isn’t it possible to configure it so that only one of my machines is able to connect to the target machine (and not the other way around)? not sure how that’s problematic.
i never used rustdesk so can’t comment on that…
i also use reverse ssh to forward the target machine’s port to mine when i can’t use tailscale.
Think of rustdesk as splitting the difference between teamviewer and bomgar. But open source and actually fucking works in Linux.
If that machine is listening and waiting for something outside to be let in automatically once a condition is met, it’s not set up correctly. Only allow remote access on demand. Anything else is irresponsible.
TeamViewer, or similar.
My mom has been running Linux Mint for 10+ years now. She is not tech savvy, but also not helpless. She has needed help a handful of times, usually with a printer.
Trying to talk anybody through support remotely is a PITA, Linux or Windows. So NAT-triendly remote desktop is very helpful.
Isn’t TeamViewer closed-source? Why are you not recommending RustDesk?
I wasn’t aware of RustDesk. I’ve looked for usable solutions in the past and was never saw it or anything else like TeamViewer.
The nature of the problem seems to require a hosted service. So TeamViewer fit the bill and was free for this use case. But I’ll have a look at RustDesk now that I’m aware of it.
All that being said, I don’t mind closed-source. I’m an open-source zealot, but I’m not Richard Stallman. I use Linux at work so I’ll use whatever software gets the job done at the end of the day. I’m just glad to see more software work on Linux.
It’s been shady, at least in the past
Oh, because of the China drama? I read up on that and that seems to have been cleared since then. Even so, there is also HopToDesk. I just think we should always suggest open-source here whenever possible.
… 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?
last few times i tried this, it was defeated by windows-only software and, for some reason, it was usually adobe software.
I did this for my dad, and then his neighbour… and then his other neighbours… also for quite a few older people near where I live.
Anyway, assuming the initial setup goes okay with wifi/printers etc and all the software is present, then it’s pretty much hands-off most of the time - though they’ll likely have 100 tiny questions initially, none of which they feel are “worth troubling you with” - so you may need to nudge them every few weeks a few times, and if possible go over and check things yourself.
There may be a sense of not wanting to bother you, or embarrassment about a mistake, then they just put up with it - for example, accidentally zooming in in the file browser, so all the files are massive, then just putting up with it instead of “bothering you”.
Any solving you do, you can show them where you find the answer/option e.g. teaching them to search the mint forums - but also knowing the Ubuntu ones will mostly work too (and for some things, any Linux ones).
You’ll need to remind them about updating, because it’s not forced on them, and if they’re prevously Windows/Mac users, they may distrust updates. You may also need to be on hand for version upgrades, at least in the first year, depending on how computer-literate they were previously.
It’s worth setting up some sort of backup with them, and setting up autosaves for office programs - then making symlink shortcuts to where those autosaves are kept. Generally you’re looking for ways to undo the panic if things go wrong - “here’s how to reverse it if you lose it/break it”.
Assuming you’re putting an adblocker on, you will probably need to show them how to update it and how to disable it if absolutely required by a website.
Check there’s something in place to transfer photos from their phone/camera etc - or any other use case where they want to transfer things on/off the computer - this might include things like “Calibre” for ebooks, or “Shotwell” for photos for instance.
Other than that… depends on the specific person and what they’re doing.
Generally though, Mint is pretty intuitive, especially if they used older Windowses - so you may find (as I did) there’s almost no support needed once it’s up and running.
Unfortunately, I just read a whole bunch of comments in another post about how Canonical trends so anti-consumer (to Microsoft-like levels) that multiple people are advocating against Mint and even Ubuntu entirely, so now my pickle is rescuing the relatives I just rescued from Windows and OS X from Mint, which they’ve been getting settled in lol. Ugh.
I think you’re alright, Mint’s whole thing is being defuckulated Ubuntu.
Maybe a comparison could be like one of those “Debloated Windows” OSs with Classic Shell that actually works and isn’t super hacky. :D
I think Ubuntu has a long way to go to “Microsoft levels”, but yeah, some of their actions are why people are less keen to recommend them to new users (and why I don’t myself). As the other person said, Mint is separate to that - it’s a bit like “Ubuntu with the crap removed”.
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.
I’ve found it helpful to install as much as possible as flatpak, since that decouples app updates from system updates
But doesn’t it eat all disk space? And don’t flatpak apps tend to proliferate dependencies on outdated stuff? From my experience (and that’s just maybe dozen of apps that simply don’t exist in the distro) when running
flatpak updatei always get deprecation warnings about some platform flatpaks that some of the apps depend on. And given that everything is few hundreds of megs, sigh…That’s why I like distros like Debian: there’s always strong pressure for apps to converge towards newer versions of libs/frameworks. Sure, it takes work to maintain but IMHO it’s worth it: once the app is in, you know it’s playing nice at least to that extent. AFAIK one of Flatpak’s core features is to lower the barrier by allowing multiple dependencies co-existing and thus removing that pressure, but that’s when the mess is inevitable.
Sorry for the rant.
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.
I mean you’re not wrong it’s true to a degree, but especially in my parents case, they hardly store anything on the computer so the disk usage hardly registers on the pros and cons. If it provides convenience then it’s whatever. They’re still on an obsolete elementaryos but flatpak is still keeping them up to date until I can get around to visiting them again. If I understand how it works on debianland once a major version goes EOL, they’d be using backports which might not have the latest version right?
point taken. I see how it can be a good balance of pros/cons.
re: debianland, i’m not sure i understand the question so…
Certain major version of a “traditional distro”, say debian 13 provides fixed list of libraries and apps (which get updated during the lifetime but only to necessary extent). each of those can only depend on a particular version selected by debian. eg. if for libfoo, the provided version is libfoo-1.2, then anyone who depends on libfoo must depend on libfoo-1.2. (if that can’t be achieved before release then that package is simply removed.)
note that two versions of the same package can’t co-exist on the same system. (this is basically true for debianland and fedoraland; because packages share the same filesystem it would be not feasible to make it work without huge amount of added complexity and bug surface. definitely not on a distro-wide level).
honestly i’ve never used backports; I don’t know what process they use to select versions; i would assume that it’s basically on a best effort basis.
personally if i don’t find the stable version new enough, I look for vendor repo, appimage or flatpak (roughly in that order)
I did a similar thing and did put them with Kinoite. My dad has had only a handful of concerns, most of which are related to the transition and learning. His system has worked great with no real issues. I think once an update failed but after a reboot it proceeded just fine.
Plasma is so modern, Fedora is so smooth, atomic is great for this purpose, fingerprint scanner works, touchscreen works, the boot splash screen looks pretty, the list goes on
Linux Mint and ChromeOS are the best for students and old people IMO
true, but it’s hard to diagnose chromeos when things go wrong, also can’t use ublock origin or any random ancient windows software one may need. (that usually works fine with wine)
