[cbcoutinho]

I've been running openSUSE tumbleweed myself for years, and recommend Linux to like-minded power users. OP is preaching to the choir.

How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.

What do you all do to help them out of this madness? Is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc the best option for seniors? My dad's entire career was in Silicon Valley 1.0 where Excel/Outlook was his bread and butter and feels married to Windows, but ever since leaving the workforce those skills are more of a hindrance than an asset.

Now that he's retired, he still uses Excel to plan vacations for example, but Windows is riddled with this BS and I am powerless to help him navigate this anti-consumer behavior. It's incredible that Microsoft is shooting their most loyal customers in the foot with this BS.

Do you all help your parents remotely? What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?

[rose-knuckle17]

Senior care and technology is going to be a gold rush over the next couple decades. Society is not prepared for the only generation who grew up on the internet to regress into mental infirmary while still believing technology is an essential need.

For those of you who haven't already had to deal with today's 70 year old MCI sufferers and technology, it is already a complete shitshow, and that generation lived half their adult lives without mobile technology.

Imagine finding 12 renewing subscriptions to malwarebytes and other security suites. Or having to burn credit cards every month because they can no longer tell the difference between ads/scams and actual needs. Microsoft, of course, helpfully shovels those scams straight to them via the operating system now. The corporations of America have figured out that milking our elders is good for a quick buck, and it is in their interests to make sure no safety nets are in place. Once they are required, they'll game whatever that system is too.

It is all the control battles our parents fought with their parents over driving, but now it is about the phone/tablet/computer, but not being able to take the phone away as a practical matter because the (first) world expects everyone to have them.

SSO and recovery keys are a problem for proxy account administrators - especially with the banking and medical sectors which still rely solely on SMS. Sites such as login.gov won't allow multiple accounts to have the same phone number. So if both you and your parents need accounts for social security, you as the caregiver can't use your phone as the second factor for their account.

For added fun, many organizations, including banks and the US Government/various federal pension boards, refuse to recognize a power of attorney letter, either. The entire modern situation leaves caregiver children having to commit technical TOS violation/fraud/perjury just to get accounts reset or to (re)gain access to submit address changes.

[Telaneo]

> For added fun, many organizations, including banks and the US Government/various federal pension boards, refuse to recognize a power of attorney letter, either.

Ouch! That's got to make things hard!

That's thankfully not a problem where I live. Here the problem is more that the banks might be a little over-eager to take agency away from seniors, since once they get a whiff of their grandson helping them with their banking and what not, they lock their account and claim to have broken their TOS or the law regarding not having other people control their account, and that if you want people to do that, you need that power of attorney.

Honestly, this is a lot better than the alternative of not being vigilant enough, and I'd honestly argue that it's better to let there be as little shame as possible in handing over your banking to your next of kind, so that when it starts getting really bad, it's not too late. But this obviously gets very individual very quickly. One senior will handle their banking just fine until their 105, while the next gets Alzheimer at 55, while the next starts to have to put a lot more effort into doing it right at 75, but they don't have any next of kin they can trust to not slowly empty their savings account once they get the power of attorney.

[cbcoutinho]

Thanks for bringing up the point about power-of-attorney, I'll have to dive into that as well.

I dread the day I have to get more involved in their healthcare from afar, precisely because of the technology gap. The money grab from big-pharma is going to unrelenting

[ErroneousBosh]

My mum is in her late 80s and only lives about a 40 minute drive away, but generally needs no support to use Linux on her PC.

She switches it on, double-clicks the Firefox icon, and it opens up.

That's it. That's the whole thing. I did originally have it set to just launch Firefox full screen on startup, but she didn't like it like that.

[einsteinx2]

> She switches it on, double-clicks the Firefox icon, and it opens up.

> That's it. That's the whole thing. I did originally have it set to just launch Firefox full screen on startup, but she didn't like it like that.

I don’t know why, but I immediately thought of the cake mix that was created that originally included egg powder so you just had to add water but people didn’t feel like they were really baking so they removed it and have you add eggs which made people happy and it became super popular.

Something about not wanting Firefox to just open automatically and wanting to double click it instead gave me the same vibes haha.

[MattGaiser]

This is why Windows will get away with it.

As much as Windows is deeply flawed, the user interface challenges with Linux are difficult to overcome. Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console, Windows will keep its market.

[Telaneo]

> Until there is a version of Linux where you don’t have to open the console

This is already the case from the Grandma use case, i.e. nothing more than a web browser and maybe Thunderbird and an office program. The terminal issue doesn't come up until you start getting into people who know just enough to be dangerous (myself included).

The larger issue is that computers with Linux pre-installed are (within a rounding error) not a thing, and thus Grandma can't go out and buy one. Telling her to install it on her current computer makes about as much sense to her as asking her to flob the nerfwhizzle. And even if she could, would she place her bets on a (to her) completely new computer system? Not without help or solid recommendations from trusted sources.

[lewiscollard]

My old man has been running Linux for nearly 20 years now. I PROMISE not only that he has never once opened a console, but would spontaneously combust if you suggested it. (I have used a command line on his computer a few times in those two-ish decades, when doing my very rare tech support, but that's just because that's the fastest way for me to get anything done.)

Maybe Windows back in e.g. Windows 2000 days would have some sort of claim to user interface discoverability and predictability which no Linux distribution would have. That ship has sailed; Windows today is a shitshow.

[4k93n2]

i think a senior thats coming from windows would probably be better off trying zorinOS. even something as minor as the taskbar being in the "wrong" place on ubuntu could be enough to turn a lot of people off

[ErroneousBosh]

You use the taskbar. Your parents do not.

They click on the browser icon and that's all they ever use.

[4k93n2]

they definitely do. ive even seen them using it

[Telaneo]

> How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.

The mom and dad gen are all on iPads or just phones from what I can tell. Very few people there use PCs for their personal computing (work is another matter, but mostly not relevant to this discussion), and those that do are more power user-y. This group largely don't need help beyond edge cases in my experience.

The grandma and grandpa generation are mostly the same story, but there's a lot more who have more or less just bailed completely outside of the absolute essentials (online banking, literal phone calls). Some are still on PCs out of a desire to not change things too much, but I'd imagine switching them over to an iPad is probably an overall improvement once you can get past the unwillingness to shift over to another system. The fact that Windows 11 is such hot garbage will hopefully aid in convincing people of that.

For those who still want a PC, there's Linux. My grandma is on Mint, but that's just because I'm her personal tech support. If I weren't around, she'd have bought a Windows 11 machine from whatever idiot at the local electronics store. I can't imagine that would have gone very well. She'd have probably bailed completely on computing if it came to that.

Very few people in this group of people need software beyond what basic Linux can provide, so Linux should be able to provide a better environment than Windows, but that are loads of potential edge cases, but they're all very small, but all very annoying if you find yourself in one.

> What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?

Mom and Dad: 'Hey, can you help me with this website?' -> 'It's broken, try again tomorrow.' or 'Try that button there.'.

Grandma: See previous.

'How do I do [thing that hasn't changed since Windows 95]'?

'What do I do here?' -> 'Read the message on the screen and act accordingly.'

'My mouse doesn't work!' -> 'Check the batteries.'

Most of these later issues are because she treats the computer mechanistically, one unchanging step at a time, so if anything doesn't go to plan, she functionally panics. I don't know how to solve this problem, but it seems endemic to me given how common of a trope it is in stories from computer savvy people helping the not-so-savvy.

I can't remember where I heard about it, but it probably comes from the fact that a large-ish portion of the population can't connect concepts to things that don't have tangible forms. Thus, all the invisible processes inside any computer (files, memory, networking) that any computer savvy person will be aware of, don't exist and don't make sense in the mind of the not computer savvy, since it has no tangible form. You can find a similar case with office phone systems. Transferring a call is apparently hard for a number of people, since a call isn't a tangible item, doing anything with it makes zero sense. At best you can get them to place calls on hold, but that's only because their office phone will have buttons with blinking lights that say 'Line 1' and 'Line 2' on them, and they can thus easily connect the light blinking with the call on hold. Suddenly it's tangible, and thus it can make sense.

[cbcoutinho]

Great points. I had at least three of your example scenarios occur between my parents and I within the last couple days.

The more time I spend online the more I'm convinced I have never had a unique experience.

[Telaneo]

We all largely interact with the same or similar services every day, so it's no wonder we all end up with similar experiences.

Thankfully, I don't have to deal with this every couple of days. Dad rarely ventures outside of his comfort zone, so needing to help him with some website is a very rare occurrence. Grandma is mostly fine so long as absolutely nothing changes. While they don't change every day, they do change every so often, in ways that I have to really focus to even see sometimes, but which apparently instantly throw her of her trail (while at the same time she's incapable of reading an error message that takes up a fairly large portion of her screen! I'm baffled to this day, but there's nothing that can be done about it). If her online bank and the few other services she rarely interacts with never change in even the slightest way for the next 20 years, I'd imagine I'd never need to be her tech support again, barring the batteries in her mouse dying again, or her computer itself kicking the bucket.