They’re in their 60’s, finally convinced them.
They say things like “This is the same…”
and I’m like
“Ya because that’s Firefox, the only program you use…”
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
whatismypurpose
yourunfirefox
As a retired software dev, for me Windows is simply a longtime habit enforced by past work environments. I did use Linux for over a year on my main PC but went back to Windows so I could keep using my old copy of Visual Studio. My deeply conditioned shortcut keystrokes didn’t work in VSCode - in fact, why did they change so much of the UI? But now that I’m used to VSCode, which I only use for hobby coding anyway, there’s no excuse and I intend to go back to Linux by year end.
VS Code is an electron app, mostly likely coded by some flavour of Javascript developers, so I doubt it was ever planned to go in the same direction as Visual Studio. VS Code follows a design very close to what Sublime made popular.
So is Visual Studio basically dead at this point? Are any new programmers choosing to use it?
It is a very different product, born as a .NET IDE and not as a code editor
no, it’s still a smoother experience ootb for things like c# desktop apps. in vscode you don’t get a wysiwig wpf designer and such, and xaml completion is worse to non existent.
It does seem to be a newer dev thing though, myself and my jr devs use vscode as much as we can and jump back to VS only when necessary, the older devs on my team are all 100% visual studio and will be forever
I’ve no idea. I haven’t used it single college.
This sounds about right. My parents only use their browsers. They literally do not use any applications outside of the browser. They would be just fine on Linux but change is scary and everything just works.
linux has 2 really good target audiences people using it as a near chrome book like experience, and ultra advanced users who want fine control of the system.
its everyone else in the middle that needs to play how much do i have to tweak in order to do what I want.
Yeah my grandma uses it without any problems. I would never recommend it to my sister or mom but i know my grandma is completely happy with her basically chromebook.
Speaking of a chromebook experience, installing ChromeOS Flex on my wife’s slow, outdated Surface Pro made it sleek and fast again. Can you suggest a Linux distro that would be similar on old laptops?
I usually use debian with x on old laptops but I’ve heard good things about gallium being pretty light
I like Xubuntu. But I’ve no experience on how well it does with touch screens.
I never though about it in that way hahahah. Makes total sense.
For that chrome book like experience, the genuinely think Chrome OS flex is probably a better option for most people (privacy concerns not withstanding).
Moving from Windows as an intermediate user was the worst. I hated Linux for like a year. I knew just enough quirks about Windows to get 95% of what I wanted, 95% of the time, and on Linux I had to start from scratch.
Now of course I love I made the switch, as my Linux proficiency let me customize the heck out of everything, but damn, that first year…
Do you have a top 5 list of things you hated?
I don’t have a “top 5”, but the main thing was outdated software. I went to Debian because I wanted “stability” and heard that it was good, but it ended up meaning the “15-minute bugs” I encountered weren’t fixed for basically the whole year I used it, all the apps looked like they were made in 2007, and if it weren’t for Linux forums I would never have known that there were more “modern” Linux apps, and I would have been left believing Linux development basically died
Yeah this tracks, I don’t understand why people recommend Debian so much, especially to new users. Distros that update more regularly like Mint or Fedora (for non nvidia users) are much better options.
This was my mistake, but I don’t think people recommended Debian as a desktop OS - I believe it was recommended as a server
I feel like outdated software on the stable distro like Debian has become less of a problem with the development of flatpak.
This is one of the reasons I love Flatpak so much
I like the simplicity and that everything is up to date. Not sure about the weekly 11 GB of updates though.
I wish instead of complaining to people that they didn’t read the docs or whatever that linux devs would scour the internet for these criticisms (like when specifics are provided) and then develop solutions for them.
Yeah, people are shitting on your product because it’s not obvious. Make it more obvious!
(Thankfully this is starting to happen…)
I had my mom on Ubuntu for most of the 2010’s, and then the macbook it was on had catastrophic hard drive failure around the pandemic, but then I was like, you don’t work anymore, why exactly do you NEED a computer to begin with? So now she literally doesn’t have a computer and just lives mobile/tablet OS life, which in a nonprofessional context seems perfectly serviceable these days.
Beyond my normal use case, I still think there are some Internet things that are “big screen” tasks. Too many websites still have poorly optimized mobile interferfaces.
I’m an ex web dev but I still maintain a few non-profit websites. It adds a much t my time load to make sure, what I sometimes a quite complicated system, mobile enabled. And even then it’s often more difficult to use a website with a lot of information or a necessarily complex store/booking system on a mobile phone or laptop. A larger screen with more screen real estate can make UX much nicer. But people have this perception that convenience or ease of access translates into easier to use. Hell even just using a keyboard n a desktop compared to a phone keyboard.
This has been my life for years. Now if you put a modern windows computer in front of me I feel like I’m 90. nothing works how I expect or is where I expect and just get confused and angry and start complaining about how in my day things were different and better.
I miss win7
Last time I tried convincing em to install Linux, they said “I’m on it” to end up ghosting me after like I was a weird, random beggar they met on the street.
If you install something like Ubuntu for them, they won’t bother switching back to windows.
Usually the reaction you’ll get trying to convince someone to use an operating system when they don’t know or care what an operating system is
“Do you mean the Internet? I use Bing.”
“Install Linux”, is usually a hurdle for most people. We should be willing to help with that part.
I got my parents in their 70s to use Ubuntu for a few years now. All they use is a web browser and word processing application for .docx files. They used MS Word for years and I found Only Office has a similar UI and opens word docs.
At one point I gave them an older laptop running windows again and they hated it. They wanted Linux back.
Libreoffice has an option for a ribbon user interface. It makes it nearly identical to Microsoft’s stuff that I grew up on.
If it was for me, I would support a FOSS alternative but, parents didn’t enjoy the Libreoffice experience.
I’ve never really liked the UI in LibreOffice either. It’s usable, but always felt clunky to me. And it feels so heavy and ponderous to use. That says something from someone who wears the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD…
I did use OnlyOffice for a bit and I thought it was better for my needs than LibreOffice. But it was still overkill my current needs. So now I’m down to just AbbyWord and Gnumeric since I only need the odd document and simple spreadsheet.
Edit for missed word
How do I use it?
There’s a button labeled “User Interface” in one of the alt menus that I don’t remember the name of.
Seems to be under “view”
That’s definitely it! Thanks for clarifying!
I tried to find this, but had big issues finding where to toggle this. I find the default UI very cluttered and confusing.
View > user interface > tabbed
Onlyoffice is a near clone of MS office though, so there’s basically no friction in adopting it unless you’re heavily into advanced Excel features.
From my experience, OnlyOffice provides better compatability with MS Office-files (that is, more so than LibreOffice). However, having used Powerpoint quite a lot in my professional life, and using OnlyOffice Presentation to make a slide deck now, that is an area where I unfortunately find it severely lacking. There’s also the issue about their license - I am not all that familiar with it, but apparently they are not as free and open as they claim to be.
What ever happened to Open Office? That used to be the defacto replacement to Microsoft Office. I haven’t used office tools on a personal computer in over a decade though, so I’m very out of the loop there.
LibreOffice is as far as I know a continuation of OpenOffice.
Thanks. Can that still be installed on Windows systems?
Yes indeed!
For historical info - Oracle bought OpenOffice and started to close it down, so all the developers that worked on it forked it into LibreOffice
Oracle has since given OpenOffice to an open source group, Apache, but the main development still happens on LibreOffice
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Beautiful 🥲
Did the same thing. Got them using FOSS apps on Windows (Firefox, LibreOffice, Thunderbird), then switched them and made Linux look like Windows. They never cared, kept on using it like nothing changed.
What distro did you get them on?
Does it really matter? IMO the only thing that matters is that they got rid of Windows
No it doesn’t, but my 75yo dad has been asking/thinking about switching when Windows 10 eol.
Most of my Linux/Unix experience is at the server level.
Fwiw, I’d say put him on FedoraKDE or Mint. Mint is the classic beginner distro now that Ubuntu has lost favor, and I just have a thing for Fedora, but it’s a popular distro with plenty of help available and KDE feels pretty windows-y (or windows stole from KDE but who’s counting.)
Thanks, I’ll check them out. I’ve heard mint a few times as a good beginner distro. I’ll probably dual boot my PC on whatever I am gonna recommend him for a bit so I get my bearings and can support him a bit :)
Ubuntu as its what Im most familiar with
Way to go, mister/miss!
Mass
Ive seen mx. be used for that but it sounds dumb for me because its too similar to the french abreviation for pieces.
(14 pc. = 14 mcx)
mcx
I think MCX is also a kind of an assault rifle.
It’s also 1110 in Roman numerals.
Which is also 14 in binary.
Around 60 kilograms or so
Check it out, I’m a masshole! *toot*
Appropriate username
Great! I’ve got my Dad on it, just need to get my mom off of her iPad now
iPads are solid devices. They’re expensive yeah but at least it’s not a fucking Windows tablet. And if you need something just downright idiot proof Apple has got your back.
Somehow iOS confused my technology illiterate mother, but she knows how to use Android.
Because ios/ipados ui is very bad and unintuitive.
To make it look “clean” and “minimalistic” you actual features are hidden behind hidden menus, you need to use the share menu to do basic file operations that are not share related, and they keep adding more unrelated functions either there in the text selection overlay.
The worse is that when something doesn’t work you cannot do anything since it should look good, so if an app starts bugging (which can actually happen a lot), you wan’t be able to properly see what’s happening maybe you can empty cache in their messed up settings where every new app is a new setting tab…, won’t be able to pick default app for opening something, you might as well uninstall other apps to select default banking app. Basically every time there’s a problem, you will not have possibility to fix it because it’s supposed to be problem less, which it isn’t
technology related muscle memory? once people learn a thing, its hard to convince them to relearn something new … especially when you “are just doing the same thing anyway”.
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Providing minimal malware protection while being actual malware?
I can’t believe Microsoft is doing EEE on malware
Always been.
If either of my parents could use a computer it would run linux.
But then I have to do all of their online tasks anyway, so technically they are using linux.
I’d like to interject for a moment, what you’re referring to as Linux is actually gnu/linux/churbleyimyam
They’re in their 60s*
But lovely story ❤️
