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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

I'm telling you, installing Ubuntu is the way to go for ~70+ yr old parents. Put firefox and chrome on there, throw some bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar (local weather, some news, facebook, amazon, whatever else they like), connect thunderbird to their ISP email address that they've had for 25 years, install zoom, and life is great! I've had roughly zero problems in the past ~5 years with non-techy parents going this route.

If there is a problem or question (usually just operating some website) I can hop on via remmina remote desktop and help out easily.

Brother laser printer/sacnner also recommended for good reliability without drying out ink.

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10 years ago I would've agreed that Ubuntu is the most reliable option.

For me now it comes across as a bit clunky, unpolished and less coherent compared to Fedora Silverblue — Ubuntu has more visible seams where it's been built from separate projects.

A major upgrade of Silverblue is literally 3 clicks plus the time it takes to do a normal restart. It doesn't ask questions a non-techy doesn't care about, and they can't break it.

(I'm not saying your choice of Ubuntu is “wrong” or anything, but if you haven't yet done so, it's worth installing a previous version of Silverblue and role-playing how it would work for a non-techy audience long-term.)

My experience is that Ubuntu is past its prime for the elderly.

My mum was on various versions of Ubuntu for about 15 years. Updates started to be a problem and the network manager caused a lot of trouble for her, and by extension me and her neighbours who would "help" from time to time.

I gave up and went to win 11 and haven't had trouble other than the ads and non consistent popups. If it gets worse I'll have to try something else but I'm not looking forward to it.

whispers try Silverblue… ;)

Seconded (sort of). I setup my 85 year old mom with a desktop and Pop OS, and my support headaches disappeared.

I didn't get remote desktop working, but I have it running tailscale, so I can at least ssh in whenever there's a non-network problem.

My parents have been on Fedora for years, through numerous version upgrades, without a single problem.

I taught my mum to just trust the 'install updates' prompts and it's been fine.

Of course I took care in buying a computer with complete driver coverage. It's a Beelink mini PC with Ryzen 7 processor and graphics.

> I didn't get remote desktop working

Ubuntu comes out unbaked for many years. So many bugs on the surface and no one cares. Why? Because no bonus or career advancement for bugfix.

And Thunderbird recent top menu disaster ux (it's under top toolbar now, at least on linux) made me switch from it. Great UX, they said, such a shit in reality. I used it for almost 20 years.

Maybe, Software is eating the world [1]. But now clearly the enterprise mindset is eating the software. And transforming it to shit.

1 - https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

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