Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
Old lady uses Linux … what’s your excuse?
My father, who taught computer science for the US Army, later became a government contractor, and for whom Unix systems were bread and butter, is now retired and farts around on a Mac reading political blogspam all day.
My mother, having never had any interest or real education in computing in her entire life, now uses Linux Mint to take care of important shit and keep the family organized.
I’m not a nerd.
Takes one to know one.
Here is your bootable USB-Stick.
Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers.
Next on things that totally happened today…
i worked in sales long enough to know that No, No sweet older lady ever spoke those words to you “setup on linux mint” and include the capacity for understanding hardware compliances? did everyone in the store clap too? but…it would be a nice fantasy ngl
With what I’ve been through, I’m beginning to wonder if OP is telling the truth 😂
About 7 years ago I got a call from some random lady in her 70s. Turns out her husband passed away not long ago and every computer in the house had Linux Mint installed. She needed someone to help her with some various simple techy things that her husband used to handle.
I couldn’t help but wonder how this random lady got my phone number. Turns out that one day, my Grandfather went on a walk down the road and this lady was outside tending to her garden. I have no clue how the conversation shifted to the topic of Linux, but it did. And my Grandpa knew I was in college for Computer Science, so he just volunteered me for this task.
Fast forward to today and I still help her out once or twice a year with whatever random questions pop up.
Uh my grandparents have Linux on their machine (set up a decade or more ago after I got sick of cleaning out malware/incredimail installs). They know enough to ask if stuff works on Linux though might not know to ask about Mint/Ubuntu specifically.
TBF they usually ask me first but they’ll also ask the salesperson.
Do you find it impossible for an older lady to have the capacity to understand hardware compliances or use Linux?
Keep in mind that an older lady to OP might not be that old…
Have an elderly patron at the cafe that I volunteer at as a tech support (basically helping the old sods learn how to use their phones and connect to the new digital services from the government in Denmark) and he is a Linux user too. Dude is 79 and is the fella I go to if I have any linux questions. Think he uses an old IBM ThinkPad and practically consoles everything except his web use. I want to stay as pro as him when I turn 79!
If the website doesn’t work in lynx, it’s not worth visiting
Man, I tried that approach on a MacOS terminal and it’s confusing as heck. Great for slacking off at work pretending to still be working, though. Someone once made a terminal app for browsing Reddit, maybe they can for Lemmy too? :D
Hi Richard!
I did once have a very not technical mate ask for some help with their laptop, and it was randomly running edubuntu? I was like yeah no worries I got this but why TF are you running linux, they didn’t even really understand, apparently some random friend had set them up with it because they didn’t want to pay for windows lol.
edubuntu
An education focused Ubuntu distro, weird. Also getting into Linux because it’s free is a great reason to get into Linux, if you get comfortable with it now it can help you in many STEM careers in addition to your own needs and proposes.
Presumably the friend was familiar with it and didn’t want to recommend something they didn’t know.
That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone’s time with this kind of question. Plus: “we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!”
Doesn’t need Linus for that, the average Arch user should be enough
That really does not sound like Linus to me. The guy can be quite blunt and will gladly reach for swear words in his e-mails. But he can just as well be accommodating. I imagine, he’d be delighted that an old lady is running his software.
That doesn’t sound like Torvalds at all. The guy doesn’t suffer fools, but he doesn’t just pop off at people randomly. All accounts are that he’s a pretty chill dude.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 23•10 months ago
Mouse? Sure. Those are standardized and interchangeable. 99.999% chance of success.
Graphics card? Wi-Fi interface? Now you’ve got problems.
My experience is still pretty good there. Back in ~2015 my family got an USB WiFi card which needed an out-of-tree module, which the manufacturer had on Github, complete with DKMS instructions. It was upstreamed after about a year, though!
The only completely unsupported device I’ve had is my laptop’s fingerprint sensor.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 6•10 months ago
You won’t be having such a good experience with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom and NVIDIA have nothing but contempt for the Linux community.
Except if it’s for their own gain
Even then 99% of the time it’s just installing a single package to fix it. Just gotta check the lookup table on the wiki
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 3•10 months ago
I’m afraid that’s not true. Attempting to use an NVIDIA GPU will cause problems. You can kinda-sorta mitigate some of them, kinda-sorta, but not really, and the web is filled with people complaining about said problems.
Man I must be lucky or something, not 1 problem with my NVIDIA GPU. Tho more likely I picked the distros that had better NVIDIA support.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 5•10 months ago
Must be. Once I started having problems with NVIDIA on Linux, I swore off all NVIDIA products and never looked back. Zero tolerance for that nonsense.
I think it’s gotten better in recent years. Years ago when I was trying to switch to Linux I had an NVIDIA 750 GTX Ti, back when it was the first Ti card and required the absolute latest drivers. Ubuntu’s repos didn’t package those drivers and Nouveau didn’t support it, so I had no choice but to install NVIDIA’s drivers manually. Then every time the kernel updated the drivers were effectively uninstalled and my system was unusable until I reinstalled the drivers manually. That experience led me to switch to AMD for the next card I bought.
About a year ago though I switched back to NVIDIA for the AI capabilities and I’ve had an absolute flawless experience with it, despite using (or because of?) Arch.
Graphics card is generally ok if it’s AMD, and Nvidia is also ok with a bit of extra with. Intel I’ve never used anything that wasn’t built in.
For wifi, Intel or Atheros cards are high chances of just working. Some other stuff can be hit or miss but I’ve found most recent USB adaptors are ok.
Why do you lie like this?
Is this satire? Forgive me, but 99.999% of the population has no idea what a kernel is. Also, since when would a mouse care about your kernel version? Puzzling post.
I’m imagining, it said on the packaging of the mouse that it needed that kernel version.
In Linux, the kernel delivers most drivers, so it may not yet have had the appropriate mouse driver in kernel versions before that.
Maybe this is possible, but typically you’re lucky to even find Linux support mentioned at all.
Kind of surprisingly, but kind of not, I’ve often seen it mentioned for such rather basic hardware.
Thing is:
- The chip manufacturer sells in extremely high quantities (to many mouse manufacturers).
- They probably hardly have to do anything for Linux support, because it’s such basic hardware. Write a driver once and slightly maintain it over the decades.
- Aside from low cost, their only real sales argument is reaching a bigger market with their chips, and the Raspi crowd + deals with organizations running exclusively Linux, isn’t that irrelevant either.
What grocery store and where? I set up Linux Mint for my Mom. She’s 67.
Don’t really want to doxx myself, but in the Helsinki area
BRB, gotta make some phone calls, Mom’s lost in Finland apparently.
More Finns should be using Linux, specially considering its Finnish origins.
Also, hello from the other side of Östersjön 👋
Hejsan, Jag håller med! :)
I work in IT and my hate for baby boomers is real but after reading this I am less hateful. Thanks
Reminds of Penthouse Forum stories.
So you’re the nice boy from the store? Good to see you here. I got my mouse connected and can now browse fediverse using my Linux Mint. BTW I’ve checked and I’m running Linux kernel version 6.2.9. Should I update?
- thepoaster ( @thepoaster@lemmy.ml ) 5•10 months ago
I worked retail in electronics for quite a while and all the linux people I encountered were turbonerds for the most part. Thankfully I think that is changing. I imagine this lady had one of her family members set her up of course.
Assuming this story is true, Linux is going to be a nightmare for that woman. It’s come a long way, but it’s still not as dead simple as it needs to be for non-technical elderly people.
tbh: she probably clicks on the thing that says “INTERNET” and thats it. I’ve been setting up a few computers in my family for people 50+ and they mostly don’t even know the name of the program they use and mix it all up. I then just install a program and prefix the shortcut with the service. Like “MAIL Outlook”, “INTERNET Firefox” so they know where to go.