Hello there. Was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for a Linux distro for grandparents? They are over 70 years old, with an old HP desktop and laptop running Windows 10. All they need is a Web browser, so no need for special software or wine to run Windows programs. Would preferably like something that is low maintenance so I don’t have to be constant tech support for them (apart from the initial install and setup). Thanks for any suggestions.
Mint easy to install easy to navigate
Thanks, I will put Mint on a USB, along side some others as well. I have fond memories of Mint, as it was my first distro.
Mint is definitely the right choice here. I’ve had it in my main machine for about two years now and I’ve had zero issues. If I had to set up something for family, I’d 100% choose Mint.
Make sure you put the internets on it so gram gram can whip some ass in online poker
Mint is the way to go. Easy UI, stupidly stable, relatively up-to-date, easy to fix problems.
I installed hacky ChromeOS to my grandma’s laptop a few years ago. She never had issues with the OS itself, rather hardware issues. It’s easy to learn and ChromeOS is literally just a web browser, it’s not even useful for anything else. Though I would recommend you install something like Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or a distro from UniversalBlue instead. Container based distros are secure and hard to break.
I know how this sounds, but (rolling) openSUSE.
I have my parents and granparents on Tumbleweed, but I update it manually when I visit.
I set them with a big macos style dock at the bottom of the screen and that’s all they need tbh (Firefox, Kmail, Office, Signal, photo gallery … that’s it).
Never had any issues, but can’t complain much about Debian & Fedora either (I had them on Debian for like a decade, less than a year on Fedora, I think now 4 years on Tumbleweed), it’s just that it was a pain for me to upgrade them when the time came, so I wanted a rolling distro.However, if I ever have to set them up with a new PC (instead of constantly upgrading their rigs with old parts from my PCs), I’ll try opensuse.org/Aeon. Seems low maintenance & low extra config for my usecase.
Just keep them on Windows 10 unless there is an issue. Don’t make them learn anything else.