My mom has been a lifelong windows user and has not used any other operating systems before besides her iPad and iPhone, but she’s pretty good at figuring things out technology wise as far as I know, but still just wants her computer to just work.
After my mom finished using quickbooks and other windows hold only programs I recommended Linux to her especially since she was on windows 10 and couldn’t upgrade to 11.
I just installed Linux mint for her and got her all setup with all her files in the same place etc. I even cloned her windows 10 system and setup a virtual machine with her old system in case of an emergency she needs something that just doesn’t work on Linux or something we missed, it’s pretty slow due to running the VM from an HDD but I told her she shouldn’t need to use it except in some extreme circumstances.
Her use cases these days are looking through, saving photos from her phone, browsing the web, and some word processing / spreadsheets which I setup to have the tabbed view similar to Microsoft office. I also installed the Google Chrome flatpak for her so she can sync all her bookmarks, and such back onto her device.
I setup unattended upgrades and helped her verify all her peripherals and Bluetooth devices are working.
So far so good only hiccup seems to be she has some saved emails in .msg format which can’t be opened but I read I can convert those files into a readable format for her, worst case she can use the vm I setup.
I let her know I’m available for tech support whenever she needs if something comes up.
Looking for feedback on anything I may have missed or might want to tell her to ensure she has a good experience.
Nice - I’ve done a similar thing for my mom, except she was transitioning from macOS (but had used Windows a lot previously for work). So far she has had a package conflict that broke the package system (Signal was installed from their PPA) which raised a rather ominous error message for her (“Your package system is broken”). I could fix it easily as I had set up VNC via SSH, and that worked as expected first time I needed it, but it’s not something she would be able to do by herself. And I still haven’t installed Singal in a way that won’t break things later yet…
She still uses her old Macbook on and off, and there are some things she only has access through that machine. I want to set up better cross platform solutions for her. Especially file sync and images needs to be fixed, but I’ve not landed on a way to do that. I could set her up with an account on my Nextcloud, but I don’t like having access to her files and I also would not want to be liable for her files disappearing. Same with images. I use Nextcloud for images myself, have thought of setting up Immich. But same thing here, don’t really want to have access to her stuff (not sure if Immich can be set up to be E2EE?)
You should install Signal as Flatpak. It should be available through the app store if you are on Mint. Otherwise see https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.signal.Signal
Do not consult companies websites for how to install on Linux if you can avoid it, they will nearly always break your setup. Just head for the app store and click the big green button.
Signal on flatpak works well, and I agree. The only thing I had to do was edit it with flatseal to let it access my home directory - sending files and pictures didn’t work properly until I did that.
Flatpak can be confusing when you try to access the file system without the rights until you realize it’s the sandbox config.
Install signal in distrobox or in flatpak,simple synch go with synthing