Torturing My Father & Mother In Law

[Madchatthew]

Not really though haha. My father-in-law called me on Sunday and had some questions about his computer. He stated that he had windows 10 installed. Come to find out that the laptop isn’t compatible with windows 11 and he was going to buy a new laptop. Then he asked about, how about installed the other operating system Linux. I told him yes definitely do that so you don’t have to buy a new one. Then you can at least try it out and see if it is doing what you need it to do and if not buy a new one later.

So he asked if he could drive 1.5 hours to our place and have me install Linux for him. I said sure, come on over! So when he packed up his laptop he remembered that he had bought another one and forgot about it.

Back to the first laptop in a minute. So the rediscovered laptop was compatible with and had windows 11 installed. However, it wouldn’t boot up to windows 11 so i thought since they haven’t done anything that i would just reset it and see if it would work then. But then the bit protector app, that I forgot the name of, kicked in and blocked me from doing anything. He didn’t have the recovery key and didn’t remember if he even received one from the place he bought it from. He bought the laptop for $150 from a place that buys them from a company and such. So he decided to have me install Linux on that one as well.

Now back to our regularly scheduled story. So I backup the data on both drives and proceed to wipe the drives and install Linux. Now you may be wondering what flavor of Linux did I choose. I almost installed Arch Linux but i didn’t, because they wouldn’t have been able to keep up with all the updates and such through the terminal. They would have hated it. So I decided to install Fedora KDE Plasma Linux. This way they would have more updated software but not the latest and it would be more stable. They also wouldn’t have to end up installing from scratch a new version of the operating system like I have had to do many times, except with Arch and Fedora.

So I was able to get Fedora installed and let me tell you, those computers were sssoooooo much faster. The one that he had forgotten about was even faster than the one he called about. Fedora ran so fast on them, I was impressed. All they do is use them for internet, like youtube, facebook and accessing online accounts and such.

I showed him how to update them when the icon appears and do perform those updates and he should be good to go. At some point I will get it so I can remote into the laptops and help keep them updated and such here and there or when he has trouble. It will make it easier for the both of us.

So that is my new Linux story of torturing my parent’s-in-laws with Linux and making them learn something new haha! At least they are willing to try and see how it goes. If they just don’t like it, then I may offer to buy those laptops and use them for something around the house and such. We will see.

Thanks for reading and I really do enjoy this community.

[DownPW]

ZorinOS would have been a good choice too, but Fedora is cool too

[phenomlab]

@DownPW Yes, ZorinOS is good for those switching away from Windows. There’s also AnduinOS

https://www.anduinos.com/

[phenomlab]

@madchatthew I just love the title of this post…

“Torturing My Father & Mother In Law”

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab said:

@madchatthew I just love the title of this post…

“Torturing My Father & Mother In Law”

Yeah I couldn’t resist because it kind of felt like it at times haha

[Madchatthew]

I have an update regarding this. They both said that they are getting used to navigating Fedora and that it is working great for them so far. They said there is still a bit of a learning curve they are going through but overall happy.