Linux is ready for a lot of people. Inset my parents up with Ubuntu six months ago and they like it. Not super tech savvy, they can wait word docs, email, and browse the web. All their purchase price went to hardware and none to Microsoft!
The symptom was always the same : "I can't upgrade anymore". And the reason was always the same : like 20 different kernels in /boot, which has no more free space and was breaking upgrade process for any package.
EDIT : sorry to have to ask that, by the way : I'm on kde neon myself, but I always make my own partition scheme, so I can't answer that question.
It is definitely one of those things where the default case has been made to cover everything and has gotten really complicated.
But the upgrade tool really should be smart enough to clean up the oldest kernels when /boot gets full. That's pretty sad if they haven't fixed that yet.
apt-get autoremove
It's just not enabled by default, you have to put it in /etc/cron.monthly, if you want it to just run for you.
Newer Linux boot loaders have largely eliminated the need, but old compatibility items everywhere tend to stay stuck well beyond the point where they ceased actually being necessary anymore (partially due to the "if it is not broke, don't fix it" mindset).
But the problem you describe is not a failure of having /boot be a small separate partition. It is a failure of the upgrade scripts not cleaning up old, no longer used, kernel files.
It's curious how a "supported" OS like Windows 7 mysteriously only runs on old hardware and cannot be bought anymore. You'd almost think they're trying to force you to upgrade.
These older folks built the very things you used. As for the "definitely not going to understand" bit, there's a not insignificant chance that I understand it better than you.
It's immature word games at best, and insecure egoism at worst, to act this way in the face of overwhelming rhetorical truth. The vast majority of "old" people had zero use for the tech as we know it in their daily lives for most of their lives. As such, most of them have no idea what is going on.
This is common sense, well understood fact.
I'm glad you're capable, but please be realistic.
I suspect you're colored by your biases but I'm not an expert in the soft sciences. I'm not sure who you consider old people, but many of us have been using computers since we actually had to make computers do what we needed - often with programming for our own specific needs.
I'm working really hard to be polite. I'm kinda tired of the generic statements about old people and the assumption that we're not technically competent.
Now, I'd like to take a moment to say that we both may have different ideas about what is, and isn't, old. Frankly, I consider anyone over 55 years of age to be old. (I'm well past that, if you're curious.)
We designed your Internet, wrote the programming languages that power your computer, determined the state of individual electrons so that we could make a CPU as you know it, and wrote the very mathematics that you base your works on today.
On top of that, we weren't unique - but stood on the shoulders of giants.
I'm going to reveal a bit about myself - if you don't mind. Do you travel? If so, you're probably doing so (albeit by extension) based on my work. I'm a mathematician and if you've ever dealt with traffic that's modeled (be it pedestrian or vehicular) there's a good chance that it was based on, or advanced by, my work.
That's right... Every day you drive to work, you're relying on my work. Specifically, I hold a Ph.D. because I advanced the art of mathematics in regards to working from the initial state - and assuming imperfect knowledge. If you've heard of chaos theory, I built based on that.
Now... To get back on topic, I hated computers. I hated them because I had to make them do what I wanted - I had to develop a means to use this calculating machine as I wanted. They didn't have stuff like downloads at your nearest URL.
You made a comment about the missus. She's a soft science major who worked for humanitarian goals. She's not even remotely technical, and not even more than a layman. It's not my fault that you've assumed the position where they're appliances and decided everyone who is old is unable to understand them. You're wrong.
That's pretty strong, for me. In short, you're wrong. I don't care who the "vast majority of people" are that you interact with. We call that selection bias, and probably more. I interact with (and I'm VERY much retired) people who used to work for DEC - designing and physically building modems. They are in their late 70s.
If the vast majority of old people you interact with are incapable of a bare minimal level of understanding, pick new people to interact with. I went to university with some of the founders of what you call open source - and my first attempt at BASIC was a fine example of open source programming.
I'm not special. I'm not unique. I pretty much HATED computers and only programmed because I had to. I only learned to understand because I needed to. There are millions of us.
Again, you're WRONG. We "older folk" may actually not only understand the technology, we understand why it is the way it is. To make a generic statement about all older folks, more so with a "certainly," is... Well, I have no way to put this? It's ignorant. You can pick one of two paths. I will leave that to you.
Also, being 35, I must say that I find retired people way more deep into technology, especially internet, than my generation. It's very common I talk with previous school friends and they say they don't have any social profile on the internet. The reverse is true for retired people, it's rare I hear them saying they don't have a least a facebook profile. But here too, I guess it could be "just the people I see".
Regarding how old people are seen, I wonder if there is not something larger at play. When I was a teenager in the 90', I was seeing old people as physically weak and mentally tired, and thought it was just the way it is. This summer, I went to the birthday of a friend's mother, and was shocked when I discovered she turned 70. And then, I realized her husband, their brothers and sisters etc were all about the same age. And here is why I was shocked : they were doing great. Actually, really great compared to what I remembered about that age, to the point it couldn't be just me growing older and having a more nuanced vision (like: most of the 90' 70ers were handicapped in a way or an other, almost none in the ones I saw at that birthday). And then, it stroke me : people in their 70 during the 90' were people who fought WWII.
Could it be that we tend to see older people as less potent just because we were used to old people who had been greatly diminished by a massive and painful conflict?
Obviously, this would not be proof : even if we accept the hypothesis that present day old people are indeed more capable than past ones, and it's not just an interpretation from me, for all we know it can be just healthcare progress or easier lifestyle. It would be interesting to find out how old people were seen before world wars, if they did any better than their children who fought them. The fact that such event could have lifelong impact does not seem far fetched, though, it could be an interesting hypothesis to test. If anything, it could help prevent preconception against old people who did not go through such events.
I get it, you know computers, other people know computers. Most people don't. That's the only point I was making. Thank you for your work in traffic modeling. The rest of the humans on Earth(I've traveled most of it for business), generally can only handle checking their email, if it's already been setup for them.