Will be brief, her laptop is EOL with windows 10 being discontinued. I have an old laptop laying around that I could repurpose for her. If I reimage with Windows 11 she would be familiar and her son who lives nearby could give her assistance from time to time but I have to install by creating a custom image via Rufus as the hardware of my laptop is not supposed to run Win11. If one day Micro$oft decides to drop unsupported devices she will be back with an unusable computer.

I could install Mint and she will likely be ok but I will be in charge of IT support if something goes sideways. She only needs OnlyOffice and an app to read and edit pdfs.

The reason I am posting here is to ask: how often did you had to help a family member with Mint? On my computers I never had issues as it pretty much is set and forget but I am far from the standard user. Can you share something that happened with you?

If I manage to get her on Mint she will pretty much be able to use that laptop up until the moment the machine will stop working or if she decides to get a new one. With windows she will be able to use it up until the vendor will decide otherwise.

And, last one, assuming I set Mint for her and considering I want to have near 0 chances to be called for issues, shall I go for LMDE or the standard edition?

Going to work now but will respond once I get back home

  • 18107@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    I switched my mother’s laptop from Windows to Linux Mint (Cinnamon). I put all the shortcuts in the same place, and made sure the bookmarks were identical. She barely noticed the difference.

    I need to help about once per month when the laptop shows an “error” message, but it’s rarely anything difficult to resolve. Often just “save as docx or odt?” or “updates complete, please restart”.

    I personally believe that switching to Windows 11 will be more difficult for her to learn than switching to Linux Mint. I do recommend setting up Timeshift and automatic updates.

    • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      8 days ago

      That is the kinda things you can do when you can be with the person when you do the switch. I need to set it up on my own and ship it to her