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Comment by noah34 | Hacker News Reader

good luck getting ol' grandma to flash her desktop with Fedora/equivalent

Flash it for her. The result will be a more stable (in terms of not shitting the bed randomly one day or changing the entire UI) and decluttered portal to whatever website she uses it for.

Let me provide you a preview of how this will go:

"You moved my Chrome. I liked my Chrome. Put it back. I can't get to the Facebook. I want to talk on the Facebook and I can't because you moved my Chrome."

1. It's probably not hard to put her Chrome back where it was and set her homepage to Facebook.

2. These users wouldn't be the people referred to by the article though, right?

Fedora is quite capable of doing absolutely nothing but opening Chrome and going to Facebook.

can you lock fedora down such that a few bad clicks dont disable the desktop manager and boots it into the terminal?

this is the real problem with Linux on the desktop for non-power users

Guessing this is just a hypothetical, but if you really can do that (disable the DM via the GUI by accident), I'd be curious. If you told me to do that on purpose, my first instinct would be to uninstall the package.

Which few bad clicks would put a fedora install in that state?

If you do have permissions to install packages you can end up with a system in messed up state pretty easily.

1 - Enable wrong ROMFusion because you need these damn video codecs for VLC. I have like 20 years of Linux experience and I still messe up Fedora in 2025 trying to make video work.

2 - Just forget that big update going in background and shutdown system when not appropriate. Boom. On Windows its just much harder to accidentally do it.

Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.

> Only solution is really distros with immutable root and snapshots.

Lucky for you then, as Fedora does have an immutable desktop flavour!

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

Thanks. Will check it out, but unsure if Asahi have an option for this.

If you talking of users who dont install their own software and just use browser only then Linux was better for them for decade.

Now you can even install something with read-only system partition with snapshots so not even a power outage can corrupt anything.

For non-power users who do need to install something it was never perfect, but now these immutable distributions are here. They have their own downsides though.

I guess you could use something like Fedora Silverblue if you feel like doing some initial explaining.

And it looks completely different from Windows.

The icon is in a different spot. The task bar looks different.

DOA.

gift links for you:

https://linuxvox.com/blog/linux-os-that-looks-like-windows/

https://fosspost.org/make-linux-look-like-windows/

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-make-linux-look-like-window...

https://www.xda-developers.com/4-ways-to-make-any-linux-dist...

Someone who is 75 years old today was 49 years old at the peak of the dotcom craze, and is probably a lot more computer literate than you're giving them credit for. What you're saying might have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today.

Oh no. Not at all. My mother would say "You moved my facebook" when she could not find Chrome. These people exist.

Yeah, no. Maybe in the circles that we run in here on HN but Linda Q. Senior worked as a paralegal 25 years ago and is still using the email her ISP gave her in 2003. She asks her son to fix the wifi and doesn't update her iPad for months at a time. She just found out about Reddit within the last three years. She gets frustrated and clicks the mouse a bunch of times when a system doesn't respond to her input quickly. She doesn't really grasp the concept of an "operating system", just that the device runs some software.

Changing the OS she uses is like tossing a flashbang grenade at her while she's sitting on the couch.

> good luck getting ol' grandma to flash her desktop with Fedora/equivalent

My kid's grandma (my wife's mom) brought me one Windows laptop too-many to fix "because there were ads everywhere".

I confiscated her laptop (I'm now using Linux on it) and had her buy a Chromebook.

People aren't using Windows under my watch / friends don't let friends/family use that mediocre piece of turd that Windows is / etc.

to be honest i forgot chromebooks exist and now that you mention them i think they're the best solution for anyone whose computer is simply a medium to access a web browser

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