I used to provide tech support for the family, and tried to move them to Linux to make them easier to support (similar simple use cases)

Thry weren’t interested so now requests for help get a genuine “Sorry, I don’t use Windows so I can’t help”

I’ve been trying to convince my wife to dump Windows for years, and her question is always the same, “will I still have MS Outlook? No? Then I don’t want it”. Her Windows 10 computer is 9 years old, has never been re-installed and it’s slower than a freaking tired snail…

We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it’s enough for their use. They’re both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!

My parents moved to Linux on their own accord: Dad just wanted something that stays the same, and doesn’t try to exploit him, so he’s been a happy Debian & XFCE user for about a decade now; Mom never used Windows, so she’s happy with Debian & GNOME I was a Debian user (and developer) back when they switched to Linux, and Debian is where they stayed. Dad’s in IT, so he can manage both systems fine, most of the time. I need to unfuck it from time to time, when Dad decides it is a good idea to try and install the latest LibreOffice Ubuntu arm64 .deb package on his x86_64 Debian oldstable, throwing whatever --force flags at dpkg he can find, but other than that, they have everything they need, are happy with their choices, and need very little support from me.

In my own household, Linux is the only system to begin with (apart from a handful of Android phones we all hate, and an XBox, which is slowly getting replaced by a Linux mini PC). I’ve been a Linux user since late 1996, and I purposefully only bought hardware that works decently with Linux, so setting up scanners, printers and the like are a breeze.

Wife saw my setup, how I operate it mostly with the keyboard (she hates the mouse more than I do!), wanted the same, so I built her something similar (NixOS + Wayland + niri + firefox + geary). She never had her own computer before, but did use Windows at work from time to time. She didn’t want to use it on her laptop, though. She wanted something tailor built for her, for her very reluctant computer-usage. So Linux it is! She doesn’t hate it, which is the best I can accomplish with anything computer-related when it comes to her. I’m maintaining her laptop, but that too, requires little work. I just update it from time to time. She’s loving that she can send a print job from her laptop, from the living room, to the printer in my work room.

Kids played with both the xbox, and the gaming mini pc I built, and much prefer the latter, because it is easier to navigate, it is faster (using cheaper hardware), it is more stable, so when they’re old enough to get their own computers, they want Linux too, and I shall abide. Luckily, while schools around here are rather windows-oriented, they have to accommodate Linux users too, so the kids will be more than fine with their Linux computers, even for school tasks. Whether they’ll end up maintaining their computers or not remains to be seen. If they want to, I’ll teach them how to.

Both parents are on openSUSE KDE. They only use the web browser and printer, so it pretty much doesn’t matter what UI they use, but it really helped with their acceptance that KDE not only works similar to Windows, it was a clear upgrade from Windows 7, with it looking more modern and being a lot faster.

I also like openSUSE for this, because YaST allows me to administer their PC without cracking out the terminal for everything. It just gives them at least a tiny bit of hope that they might be able to do this themselves. And my brother, who’s not a Linux person, has managed to fix things via YaST without my help.

Ultimately, though, I use openSUSE KDE myself, and that’s really important.
If my parents mildly complain about something, I can proactively offer to change that, because I know all the settings of KDE and YaST.
Or if I don’t know whether there’s a setting, I can go digging for it on my system.

But perhaps most importantly: “This Linux thing isn’t working.” – “Hmm, it’s working on my system, so there’s gotta be a way to fix it.”
That immediately shuts down any negativity, so I can concentrate on fixing it, rather than deflecting their grumbling.

Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.

Not Windows, but I rooted/cracked an old Chromebook for my mother and put Gallium OS on it because newer ChromeOS wasn’t suported anymore. She was able to take care of affairs with it when my Dad passed and uses it daily still to keep in touch and manage her life. 90% of what she does takes place in Firefox, so as long as an OS has that and some basic utilities like a calc and text editor, she’s good to go.

A $150 laptop bought in 2013 still able to accomplish modern tasks. It makes me sick thinking of the throwaway society we have created. When I pass by the neighborhood dumpster and see an entire perfectly fine big screen LCD TV with just a couple bad capacitors in the power supply. When I see entire vapes with batteries littering the ground. When Microsoft decides to arbitrarily kill off an entire previous generation of PCs with TPM.

I have a Fedora Workstation (i.e. Gnome) desktop, a Fedora Workstation laptop, a Windows 10 laptop I’m forced to use for work.

My wife doesn’t have a PC (well I guess she has a Steam Deck, actually, but it only ever goes into desktop mode in order to install/update Stardew Valley mods).

My daughter has my old laptop, with Mint on it.

No issues so far.

My dad did have a laptop with ElementaryOS on it, but since he bought an iPad the laptop has just been gathering dust.

I set up Lubuntu for my mom on an old laptop because it couldn’t handle mint. She liked that it felt new and familiar enough, but she didn’t love it enough to not go back to Windows when she got newer more powerful laptop.

My kids have never known anything other than Linux. They had to build their own PCs at 6 years old (under my supervision, of course) and they both originally chose Zorin OS at first. Today my daughter is 11 and runs Kinoite on her PC, and Novara on the laptop she uses for school. My son is 9 and wants to move to PopOS (still on Zorin).

My wife was the hardest sell because she was fully intertwined in Microsoft’s BS. So I built her a Nextcloud server, set her up with Fedora Workstation on her PC (her laptop is still on Windows, but she barely uses it now), and she has never complained once. As a matter of fact, she moved from her PC to her laptop last week to complete some work because she had to be out of the house, and came back telling me that she could not stand Windows anymore, so she didn’t get any work done. Unfortunately, for the local tax entity she needs Excel (ridiculous), so she wants me to spin her up a Windows VM in the same server where she has NC so that she can move her laptop to Fedora as well.

So, yeah, my whole house is Linux run exclusively now.

For me the most important thing was to use Threema/Signal instead of Whatsapp in the family groups so I’m trying not to pressure everyone to jump on the Linux boat.

I converted my fiancé’s MacBook Pro to Linux, but she’s always using her company Thinkpad which has to be on Windows.

Other than printing, it goes well because they know if they were on Windows or Mac, I’ll have nothing to do with it.

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

Kept my parents’ desktop running for 14 years with Debian, XFCE, and the occasional hardware replacement. Maybe a bit of a PC of Theseus scenario but it worked pretty great.