Meanwhile my mom just asked me to switch her Dell to her favorite linux mint flavour and the key enrollment was literally 3 key presses plus the password away.
Oops, I tried to install the nvidia drivers, but it doesn't seem to have worked.
I got a weird screen during the process, pretty sure it was blue, and the default option was 'continue boot' which I selected, I think maybe it was the 'BIOS' ?
I couldn't google what to do while at that screen, or screenshot it either, for some reason.
I've tried uninstalling then reinstalling the drivers, but that hasn't made the mystery screen to come up again, and hasn't fixed my problem.
I will now go and research a fix, but as a newbie I don't know keywords like 'mok enrolment' or 'mokutil' or 'dkms' or 'secure boot' or 'shim' because WTF do those even mean?
Go ahead and try searching, see how long it takes you to find the command you need to run when you don't know any of those terms, or even that the problem is secure boot related.
Meanwhile, the BIOS with its 'secure boot on/off' switch is available every single boot.
> the key enrollment was literally 3 key presses plus the password away
If you don't count the 8+ character password you have to enter three times, maybe.
Most laptops don't have nvidia cards. And none of those issues you're talking about occurred. She's been a happy linux mint user for more than 5 years. I was just trying to get her off her old ultramobile celeron laptop and she refused to use the new one until I ran the mint installer. For me the biggest challenge was figuring out whether to install the Mate or Cinnamon version.
It asked me for an 8 character password during install, rebooted, i entered enroll existing key. I entered the password and then continued the install, that was it. Runs like a charm, boots like a charm.
She's over 70 and she absolutely loathes the random software that various windows things try to install, or the antivirus sneaks in with the next update and stuff like that.
She just browses the web, streams stuff and wants to make sure she can screencapture the streams she watches. Turns out for that use case Thunderbird is also quite good and to my surprise the google 2FA oauth phone login makes it really easy for her to log in to google. I still remember the times when I would have to reset her google password for her.
Not to dismiss your experience, but I think for a lot of basic users it works really well.
I got a weird screen during the process, pretty sure it was blue, and the default option was 'continue boot' which I selected, I think maybe it was the 'BIOS' ?
I couldn't google what to do while at that screen, or screenshot it either, for some reason.
I've tried uninstalling then reinstalling the drivers, but that hasn't made the mystery screen to come up again, and hasn't fixed my problem.
I will now go and research a fix, but as a newbie I don't know keywords like 'mok enrolment' or 'mokutil' or 'dkms' or 'secure boot' or 'shim' because WTF do those even mean?
Go ahead and try searching, see how long it takes you to find the command you need to run when you don't know any of those terms, or even that the problem is secure boot related.
Meanwhile, the BIOS with its 'secure boot on/off' switch is available every single boot.
> the key enrollment was literally 3 key presses plus the password away
If you don't count the 8+ character password you have to enter three times, maybe.