My Son's Computer

[Rudemeister]

When my youngest son was in middle school, I built him his own computer to use. I put WinXP on it, because he also wanted to play games. Installing XP takes forever, but I did it for my son. I asked him to avoid practices like downloading games, software and widgets from the Internet. But he did it anyway. His computer starting having huge problems because all varieties of malware and obnoxious stuff was allowed on his system. He saw first hand the results of doing what I had already asked him not to do. So I wiped the disk and installed the stuff all over again. I also repeated my warning. But then he did it again. He was really afraid I was going to be very angry with him, so he tried to conceal it. He started having problems getting his work done for school. So I found out what he had done. I was very annoyed, but I didn't kill him. So....I lectured him severely and re-installed everything again. I guess the little goofball could not help himself. He did it again.

This time I put Linux on it. I told him he would be able to accomplish everything he needed to do his schoolwork, get on the Internet and stay in touch with his friends. I told him it was not Windows and would not run any of the games or things he had previously downloaded.

The computer ran flawlessly till he graduated from high school.

[Rudemeister]

This is not to say he didn't still try to do some of the things I had asked him not to do. He figured out what Wine was and tried to use it. He could just not control himself. Kids!!!! So I did what I should have done in the first place. I reduced his level of privilege on the system so he could not even try to install anything.

[BubbaBlues]

I used to have to do it for my daughter, neice, wife and afew non relatives. Trojans, browser hi-jackers, viruses, and tool bars out the a$$.
I finaly set a couple of them up with Linux. I guess the rest finaly just grew out of it, when I stopped cleaning them out for them.

[Rudemeister]

I used to have to do it for my daughter, neice, wife and afew non relatives. Trojans, browser hi-jackers, viruses, and tool bars out the a$$.
I finaly set a couple of them up with Linux. I guess the rest finaly just grew out of it, when I stopped cleaning them out for them.

Been there done that. As a matter fact, I would set it up or fix it once. I told them what they should do. But I told them that after I fixed it, if they decided to fiddle with it or some other "so called" genius came over to make it better, and they hosed it, I would not fix it anymore. I had a couple of pissed off family at first.

I switched a few of them to Linux. Some liked it, some didn't. I had one friend that said all the software he got for it and he bought for his kids didn't work. I had gone to great lengths beforehand to explain that it wasn't Windows. It didn't matter. He just didn't get it. He said, but then why if it's a PC doesn't PC software work?

Ugh.

[bimsebasse]

Wow, that sounds like pretty awful parenting and pretty dedicated linuxism

Every 3-4 months my parents sneak a "the computer's gotten very slow" into conversion and I'm then supposed to spend and hour and a half making Vista somewhat tolerable to use again. Right now I just look forward to their reaction when they see Windows 8 .

[BubbaBlues]

If I had to use windows I'd go back to XP. It's the last tolerable system they've had.

[The-Wizard]

well my daughter was a lifelong Linux is S*** windows is the only system for everyday use unless you can afford the big A,
I gave up how many times I either fixed it or spent time on the phone telling her how to fix it, So I was most surprised when on the last collaps off her W7 , she lost all of our granddaughters pictures and asked if I could recover them,[in step mint10lxde] after recovering and saving them [including some she had accidentally deleted] she said that as our granddaughter [age 5] can use it [she has her own computer here with the full suite of tux educational programs] what would i recommend and put on her Dell laptop, I loaded the full blown mint 13 cinnamon 64 bit with office and all the programs that mirror what she had in windows, that was over 2 months ago I always make a point of asking if she has problems, her comment was " once i got use to what programs to use [lets face it some of them have silly names] it was easy and the computers never been so fast.."

As a hardware man my thanks go to Vincent for his time and effort in pointing me down the right path, and the community who have built up such a comprehensive data base of problems and how to solve them for helping me learn a little about programming [although i will never be proficient]

wizard

[Rudemeister]

I have always been a tech enthusiast. I often like checking out the latest technologies. Sometimes I have drank the Kool-Aid and gone too far out on a limb too. I also do not have "Microsoft Derangement Syndrome". Long ago I was dazzled by the eye candy that was Windows. The DOS command line was not real sexy. So I kept playing with the first versions of Windows that were actually a DOS graphical shell. They were visually appealing, but terrible as far as stability went.

Then IBM released OS/2. This software worked like a dream. It was better than Windows 95 and Windows NT as a unified server/client platform. It was the server that my business network. It also ran all the clients.

When Microsoft finally succeeded in killing it, I knew this had been done as a marketing and business decision alone. Ever since then I have been suspicious of them.

Early on I installed Redhat on one of the PC's I had which had been running OS/2. Ever since then I hoped Linux would succeed.

Though I liked XP, I despised Vista. Windows 7 is pretty good. But I am still suspicious of the company that gave us this OS.

The success of Linux has been taking far longer than I would have ever anticipated. I have been saying to friends and family for a long time that Microsoft is in trouble and Linux will supersede Windows in importance. In truth, this has already happened, but to the consumer it is behind the scenes. It runs so many embedded applications that are almost invisible. Android is Linux. Linux powers the Internet and things like Google. The average man on the street does not have any idea about this.

Linux Torvalds recently gave a speech where he said the only place where it does not dominate is the desktop. He said that is because it does not come preloaded. I agree. I put it on my son's computer for practical purposes. But most of the world does not know about this or is too intimidated to try.

I think things are finally about to change though. All the tech news is abuzz with articles about Steam on Linux, the coming failure of Windows 8 and more.

I'm glad my boy has had a chance to get ahead of the curve on this. He now knows it well and likes it. That has got to be a good thing.

[exploder]

I put together computers for my 3 and 7 year old boys, Both boys are running Linux Mint 13 with the Cinnamon desktop. My 7 year old wants to play Windows games nut that is not going to happen. There are plenty of games that run in Linux theses days.

It is far easier for me to maintain the computers using the LTS release and they are all using the default repos. Mint 13 Cinnamon is very stable and it does everything we need to do. My 21 year old daughter has a Mac Book Pro, she runs the MacOS on it because the college she attends is a Mac campus. My daughter is not a Windows fan and she has seen first hand the problems Windows users go through. My daughter likes Ubuntu 12.04, she used it on one of my computers when I was in the hospital to do her homework. I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on my HP laptop because Mint 13 has problems with processor spikes for some odd reason.

All my kids know they have a reliable system and that maintaining it is easy and painless. I tried XP on the first computer I built for the kids, it took too much work to maintain and it just did not hold up well with a 3 year old using it. My boys have got over not playing Windows games and seem to be happy running Linux.

[ChinaJ]

To me, the biggest obstacle to Linux isn't that itsn't preloaded on more computers. The big problem is that with Windows (generally speaking), you just plug in and go. Whether it's hardware or software, it all works about how it should.

And while Linux seems to be OK with that at times, it isn't always the case. I just look at all the issues I've had on an old desktop at the university I work at. Running Lubuntu 12.04, trying to get the NVIDIA drivers to install correctly AND for Lubuntu to recognize and use the computers has been a nightmare. NVIDIA doesn't come with good instructions, other than "run this in terminal". Only after looking on COUNTLESS forums did I find anything close to what I had to do: Alt+F1, sudo sh install blah blah blah, reboot, configure the Xorg file... oh wait, it's not where the documentation says it's going to be... and some forums say I need to change it, others say I don't... and on and on ad infinitum.

Also, the terminal will scare away a LOT of people.

Now, I'm enjoying Linux Mint, and I don't mind messing around in forums and learning. But I'm not your average user. Let's be honest, people want the computer to work and work easily. Point and click. Linux still isn't there yet, and I don't think it ever will be; not because of any design FLAWS, but because of design PURPOSE. And I applaud it.

But when you talk about it being on servers and behind the scenes, who are the people who are behind the scenes? Computer experts, geeks, people who are paid to learn the coding and the system.