While it is good to have empathy and understanding for less technical folks, OP may be in a better position to know what is realistic for their family and level of support they can provide

Glad you got it working!

On fedora I generally dont need the terminal unless something breaks. Which if I’m being honest with myself probably breaks because I tinkered with stuff via the terminal 🥲 (I’m bad at computer)

To add to all the other answers about what to use and whatnot: try a few distros and desktops out by putting them on a flash drive and booting from the flash drive (this is the same process for typical installations)

Distro, or who the linux based OS is built, updated, and distributed by, mostly matters long term, but something that will keep working and be stable (in the colloquial sense, not technical sense like for servers), and that has a friendly and welcoming community, are definitely things to look for. Mint and ubuntu both have stellar reputations in both of these regards, though many folks (including me) have issues with decisions being made by the ubuntu folks these days. Fedora is pretty stable but has less of a big community with support for new people, and manjaro has a lot of newer users and is built around serving newer linux users, but the project is sometimes run in an awkward way that can cause issues if you’re not choosing to manage your packages with intentionality (thats what I hear anyway). Debian is rock solid, and I dont know much about the community, but the versions of software available in the repos may be old unless you’re installing a flatpak

Keep in mind, not all distros will support every desktop, so you may find your chosen desktop isnt available on the distro you find most interesting. You can theoretically install whatever desktop on whatever distro, but as a new user I dont reccomend doing this.

Definitely try out a few different desktops. “Desktop environments” are bundles of software that make up the desktop graphical user interface, and will make a big difference in the look and feel, and general user experience that you have on linux. There are a bunch of options- the two biggest projects are GNOME and Kde plasma. Gnome has a reputation for being more mac-like out of the box and has very specific workflows and usage patterns, and kde, more windows like and flexible to what the user wants. But both are customizable. Kde has lots of built in settings and options, gnome offers very few, but supports user made extensions that change the desktops look and behavior. Give both a try and try out the customizations for each (play with kde settings, see if you can make it more what you want. Install some gnome extensions, see what the options look like). Cinnamon is another desktop thats very windows-like but has a great user experience. Xfce is a well run project but predominantly aimed at being lightweight so it runs well on older hardware, you’re less likely to be in its target demographic

Its worth acknowledging that Orion is proprietary, its based on WebKit but the browser isnt open source if thats relevant to you

I for one appreciate your integrity in trying to set things up such that they’re working properly before you pass the machine off to someone else

Best of luck my friend!

From the other thread it seems it’ll just be disabled by default, and enableable if wanted

From the other thread it seems it’ll just be disabled by default, and enableable if wanted

My dead dad could use it and he was a moron.

I really was not prepared for that sentence 😅

My thoughts were more about the article itself than it being posted here. Being an article it could really easily be something that comes up when someone is trying to figure out whether they can make the switch and are doing their research on pros and cons

I think personally I also just really don’t enjoy snarky in-group humor, it feels like it often just fosters resentment for those outside of the ingroup. So I do kinda have a bias in general

I’m really glad it seems like my thoughts have been appreciated, I was kinda mentally preparing myself for people to be unhappy with me

I find this kind of stuff frustrating enough I needed to edit my first version of the comment cause it was angrier, but I want people to actually hear me out and think about the culture we cultivate in the foss space. It really matters.

There are so many issues people care about (eg. Software freedom) specifically because we want a world that is kinder to people, and then we act on that value or interest in a way that isn’t kind to people. A little empathy goes a looong way

Thank you for the kind words, I hope you have a lovely day :)

As a long time linux user, antagonizing people who are unsure if the switch is right for them is very clearly a poor interpersonal choice that will not result in the change we wanna see in the world, or more people adopting linux

Fuckin seriously, we can do better than this circle jerk. As someone who cares deeply about software being kinder to people it pains me enormously how much of a dump stat interpersonal skills are for so much of the Foss community

If the authors wanna pat themselves for linux they can do it without creating a unempathetic, condescending, preachy culture that alienates people.

Just call the article “things we love about having switched to linux” so it finds the right audience and its fine, but this shit sucks and its exactly the kind of crap that has made so many of my friends resistant to hearing what I think is good and special about Foss software. They hear me out anyway, but I’d love for it to not be a fucking uphill battle because Foss people routinely emulate the same preachy, condescending, unempathetic interpersonal apprach that everyone bemoans about the worst vegan spaces online

I’m gonna second the reccomendation to just boot it from a flash drive and try it out. Virtualization takes a ton of performance and on lots of hardware isn’t going to be a nice experience compared to actually running it without virtualization

You don’t have to make the switch, but it’ll give you a much better sense of what you might like, without dealing with lag and input delay :)

For one of my friends its just cause she has a shitload going on and enough problems to deal with without trying to figure out a new way for her computer to work and whatnot

Plus I think art stuff she uses doesn’t support linux and she found krita unsuitable for how she likes to work

Objectively hilarious.

As more of an art and design person than a technical one, yeah almost undoubtedly, though I can’t think of specific examples

But I really appreciate the work that goes into a beautiful logo, typography, or UI, and that will often sway me, probably more than it should

Void’s beautiful logo/logotype is what originally got me interested in it as a distro, and the only reason I’m not using it now is cause I’m a dummy and minimal distros require I use my brain a lot more than I’ve thus far been willing to get my computer up and going

Thats a shame to hear. Is jitsi better?

I think if I remember right it was to use portals to grant file access to the themes folder and then set flags or variables or something to force using the theme you wanted

If you’re interested in experimenting with that route I believe I also saw details for that method in various online tutorials for theming flatpacks

Thanks! ☺️

Weirdly I think my preferred theme used to not advise doing it that way, but it seems they have updated their recommendations so now I have two new approaches to try

I’d love if someone had a good answer here, I’ve really struggled to get my flatpak apps to all look nice and unified