• pedz@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I do tech support for a living. I once had a neighbor that is handicapped and she kept asking me why her computer was always asking her stuff and was rebooting ‘by itself’.

    Turns out she had a very old computer that was using a very basic version of Windows Home (she couldn’t even change the background) and it was constantly choking and rebooting because of updates.

    I installed Linux Mint on her computer and requests for support have dropped by 90%.

    In fact, I have done this for a few unexperienced computer users and because they mainly just use a browser, it’s much simpler for them.

    When you think about all the notifications Windows is showing to its users about everything, from antivirus to OneDrive, and all the actions its prompting, it’s easy to see how some very basic users may find that extremely confusing. For people like that, a stable Linux distribution will be bliss (and for the people helping them).

      • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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        1 year ago

        I would guess so. I’m running Mint on 15yo hardware. Chunky laptop, and DDR3 desktop. Between Mint and a SSD, the devices perform as well as current hardware on Windows 11.

      • pedz@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Yes but it was still a P4 running Windows 7 Home Starter so whatever modern OS would choke on that anyway. I eventually gave her an old Phenom with a triple core but with the condition that it was running Linux Mint instead of Windows.

        I moved a few years ago but I’m still going to help her a few times a year to do the updates. It’s very low maintenance compared to Windows.