A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend’s then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife’s friend say something funny that I thought I’d share with you.
They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid’s first computer, and his mom doesn’t have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn’t be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn’t visit that often, and the kid’s games still worked so it wasn’t a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.
When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I’d give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:
This Linux thing… We’ve never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.
Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.
The year of the Linux Desktop is closer than we think. Too bad the art of just owning a PC is sort of dying, thanks to GPUs costing just as much as the rest of the parts put together.
I’ve been trying to get my stepmom to switch over to Mint on her old Dell AIO. I already spun up the live on it to see if it was compatible and it ran flawlessly. She’s just afraid to make the jump and I respect that.
Its good to see the younger generations just growing up with Linux readily available and easier than ever to install.
What does “spun up the live” mean? Is this a USB install?
Yeah, the usb live environment. Sorry, I just have a certain older way I say things. When PCs used to have CD drives, we used to say we’d “spin up” something like a game or software. If I was gonna play something like Tonic Trouble, which was a CD game, I would “spin up” Tonic Trouble to play it.
More like an USB live iso. This allows to boot up a system directly from USB without installation !
This is mostly used as rescue technique, to chroot (=login) into your old system and try either to backup your data or fix issues !
Wasn’t aware it could be used as testing ground for hardware compatibility ! Good to know !
In some cases you can fully set it up to always run from the USB Stick and you can get your PC to go