I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
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@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz out of curiosity, what desktop did you went for?
@tragivictoria KDE! even back then it hit a nice middle between Windows-like UX and Linux flexibility and stability
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy - it's the nearly - and over - 80 year old moms and dads and uncles and aunts (and sometimes weird neighbours in their garage) who essentially created the personal computer and the OSs and software that run on them.
They probably know better than the rest of us what 'just works', and what are simply "Squirrel!" products.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy This is legit good news. I tried 20 years ago to repurpose my grandpa’s old tower into a Fedora machine. An OS update broke it, and the advice on forums was to SSH in and do some hand-wrangling of files.
Got a gentle chiding from him every so often until Alzheimer’s took his memory about how good I am with computers except his, and he hoped “that Linex thing” wasn’t still causing trouble.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy I’ve had both my non-techy sister and my 80+ father in law on Debian for close to a decade now.
No problem at all. Any questions they have are for the kind of stuff that would give them trouble on Windows just the same.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy What does she use it for?
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@anthropy What does she use it for?
@benfulton everything from watching DVDs/Netflix to email/internet, managing her photos with Shotwell and making small presos and docs and stuff with Libreoffice for e.g her garden club and what not else, honestly impressed with how advanced her usage of it is given her age
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
that's so awesome.
i built a PC for my parents in 2004 and my father started randomly deleting files from the hard drive whenever he perceived anything was going wrong with it. so by like 2005 he had destroyed the computer's OS beyond my capabilities to repair
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy Pretty much the same situation for my mother, except Ubuntu, an we had to get her a new ThinkPad at one point.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy My 85-y-o mum is visiting and got a call from a good friend in Queensland yesterday. She made it a point to tell her to download Signal so that they could stay in touch effortlessly.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz yeah i don't really understand where the meme of linux being unreliable is
it's more reliable than windows for sure
macos is very stable but only targets one type of machine and architecture so yeah i would hope so
a distros like fedora have always worked amazing ime -
I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy
Nice
congrats -
@bekopharm @anthropy zoom is available on flathub.
@dazo @bekopharm @anthropy ive had trouble with the Zoom flatpak, and exclusively use Zoom in Firefox. There was a (small) link on the we page when you join a meeting that was recently hidden behind a toggle in the settings, but i was able to find it, and its always worked perfectly in a browser for me on Fedora
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@anthropy This is legit good news. I tried 20 years ago to repurpose my grandpa’s old tower into a Fedora machine. An OS update broke it, and the advice on forums was to SSH in and do some hand-wrangling of files.
Got a gentle chiding from him every so often until Alzheimer’s took his memory about how good I am with computers except his, and he hoped “that Linex thing” wasn’t still causing trouble.
@spaceinvader @anthropy ive been a big fan of Silverblue and Bazzite for this reason, updates are even more reliable, and if for whatever reason the updated image doesnt work right you can select the old one in grub and run on it indefinetly until whatever problem in the update is fixed, you should *never* be locked out of your working computer due to a software/distro bug
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy hehe, my mom as well. On Linux Mint singe around ten years. I live like 6 hours away and no Problems.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy My wife is still using her 2008-ish ThinkPad, onto which we installed LUbuntu when its Windows version became "obsolete". I think it lacks video encoding hardware because Zoom and friends are not working well, but for basic use it's still doing its job.
Oh and we installed a second hand SSD at some point. Not sure if it would still be usable on a spinning rust hard drive, with software being the size it is these days.
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I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
@anthropy My mom hated how Windows programs kept "switching the buttons around." So I switched her to Linux. That was 20 years ago. She loved Linux. Her computer just worked. My dad and my sister wanted to switch her to Windows so many times and she wouldn't have it.
She used Linux for nearly 20 years and was happy with it. We started with Linspire, then went to Suse, then Vector, Fedora, and finally Ubuntu, and it always just worked. -
I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.
I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.
This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.
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that's so awesome.
i built a PC for my parents in 2004 and my father started randomly deleting files from the hard drive whenever he perceived anything was going wrong with it. so by like 2005 he had destroyed the computer's OS beyond my capabilities to repair
@rustoleumlove @anthropy Wouldn't that be solvable with the right permissions?
Does she prefer emacs or vi? Tabs or spaces? You did inform her that she can’t use 
