Welp… My mom is apparently done with windows (yay!) Anf wants me to move her laptop to Linux (oh nooo). I personally use Ubuntu studios but im not sure what to get for her. She is getting her masters in nursing online so it def needs to be able to accommodate that. Do y’all have any suggestions on where to start? TIA
Ubuntu. Simply because you use it as well. You will be the primary tech support. So something that you are familiar with is important.
If her router supports it I would set up a VPN and ssh on her computer so that you can help her. Maybe RDP or Sunshine/Moonlight as well.
I moved my mother to Mint a few months ago. I have not had a single tech support call. She uses it daily. About a week in I asked her how it was going. She liked that printing worked more reliably and wished the scroll bars in Facebook were a bit thicker. Her printer used to show as offline sometimes in Windows but that issue has gone away under Mint. I was going to look for a theme with thicker scroll bars but she told me not to bother.
Granted she was a Firefox and Thunderbird user already so that helped with the transition.
I installed Debian on my dad’s laptop recently,
My mom was not interested in the surface cause she only need Mail, Browser, Whatsapp web and here Background image. So she used Ubuntu with the side bar as good as with Mint. Same goes for gmy Granny. I propose, Ask what possibilities are important for here - Do not ask about Application - and show here afther that where to do things.
For showing the new PC. Do it with some work she has to do. Learning curve is way better thatway.
Ubuntu all the way
My grandma got along with Mint for Facebook browsing and KPatience.
If your mom is more into using real apps, plus the Windows UI, and you’re comfortable with some setup, I’d highly recommend Debian 13 with KDE Plasma and Flatpak, with the Flatpak-Discover integration. That’ll allow her to use lightweight, stable apps from apt, or more recent, but larger apps from Flathub, and install it all herself through Discover. Honestly, there should be a distro for that.
I’d be using that myself if it weren’t for some very specific software I need from the AUR.
Have you heard of Distrobox?
You can run Debian and still get access to the AUR. I moved from Arch to Chimera Linux and but I still get a few things out of the AUR.
With Distrobox export, you can even add them into the app menu in KDE. So you do not even have to manually launch Distrobox to use them.
I would put her on the latest Ubuntu LTS, make a single-user Ubuntu pro account so she keeps gettin gsecurity updates and don’t do major OS updates on that machine for the next decade. You and her can decide which DE, either Gnome (more mac-like) or Budgie, Mate, or KDE (more windows-like. Those are my win-like preferences in that order)
Seconding (or third-ing, or twelfth-ing) the recommendation for Linux Mint, but also gonna throw one in for MX Linux if the hardware is older.
i recommend version 6 😄
Something immutable with VNC for tech support
Though I’m disappointed at how ugly Cinnamon and all it’s themes are, Linux Mint (with Cinnamon).
But as someone else said, probably ought to dual-boot or have a Windows VM just to be safe.
uBlue Bluefin or Aurora. Tested and approved. I moved my dad on Bluefin one year ago, no issues, it just works for his use case (90% of the time in a browser, light photo editing in Krita, some text editing). No maintenance, no updates, no actual knowledge needed as a daily user, just a single reboot once a week to boot the freshest system image.
And more importantly, it keeps on working despite his talent for fucking up every single piece of software he lays his hands on.
+1 for uBlue. I did the same for my mother on her laptop and desktop PC for office work. Chose Aurora in this case. Setting system and flatpak updates to automatic means I hopefully never have to look after these systems again as the distro maintainers basically do the maintenance. Setting up Secure Boot with the shim/MOK method and TPM auto-unlocking for full disk encryption using the
ujustscripts is a breeze as well.Did you have any problems with Aurora? I thought it would be perfect for my parent. But ran like a dog on their laptop and could work out why. Tried Mint instead and it just worked out of the box.
+1 for Bluefin or Aurora. I daily this and I love how boring it is and haven’t broken after an update.
I’ve never heard of these. Which is not a bad thing, but I wouldn’t recommend for beginers
You’ve never heard of atomic/immutable distros? You’re part of the lucky 10,000 ;)
Bluefin, Aurora and their much more popular sister Bazzite are part of the universalBlue project: a delivery pipeline that lets anyone build their own, maintenance free atomic distro.
All uBlue projects are 100% based on Fedora Silverblue, itself an atomic distro based on Fedora. Which means that uBlue projects get automatic weekly upgrades just like Silverblue.
For people not familiar with Linux, and people who don’t want to spend any time maintaining their OS (HTPC, gaming rig etc), it’s amazing.
This sounds perfect! She needs to be able to do PowerPoint, videos, online streaming for class and tons of research and papers to write. Thank you so much!
Depends from her hardware but generally Linux mint I install for everyone who is not familiar at all with linux.
She is getting her masters in nursing online so it def needs to be able to accommodate that
Is there any specialist software she needs, or is it browser based?
Most important question.
Also try to transition her slowly from outlook -> Thunderbird and chrome -> firefox and so on. Then after a few weeks at least do the switch to linux mint. Then the shock of all the new things is smaller
I got 2 weeks for her break to change it, get it fine tuned and teach her enough to not fail instantly. Thankfully shes pretty good with computers but has never changed an OS like this.
