I’ve been trying to convince my wife to dump Windows for years, and her question is always the same, “will I still have MS Outlook? No? Then I don’t want it”. Her Windows 10 computer is 9 years old, has never been re-installed and it’s slower than a freaking tired snail…

Kept my parents’ desktop running for 14 years with Debian, XFCE, and the occasional hardware replacement. Maybe a bit of a PC of Theseus scenario but it worked pretty great.

I don’t think my kids have ever used a Windows machine. I have a couple of machines at home that both run Linux Mint and they use Chromebooks at school. There is not much software that they need that is not either a web page or also available natively.

My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it’s enough for their use. They’re both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!

I needed to update my parents old NUC from Win7, it was either new hardware to run Win10 or give Linux a try, I told them I had been running Linux since 09 full time and it isn’t any harder than running Windows.

I said how about you give it a go for a month or so and see how you go.

I installed Mint, it has been a few years now and no real issues beyond taking a while to get the printer working. I installed rust desk for remote assistance which I have only used 3 times since install.

I set up Lubuntu for my mom on an old laptop because it couldn’t handle mint. She liked that it felt new and familiar enough, but she didn’t love it enough to not go back to Windows when she got newer more powerful laptop.

I have a Fedora Workstation (i.e. Gnome) desktop, a Fedora Workstation laptop, a Windows 10 laptop I’m forced to use for work.

My wife doesn’t have a PC (well I guess she has a Steam Deck, actually, but it only ever goes into desktop mode in order to install/update Stardew Valley mods).

My daughter has my old laptop, with Mint on it.

No issues so far.

My dad did have a laptop with ElementaryOS on it, but since he bought an iPad the laptop has just been gathering dust.

Moved my sister to Ubuntu a while ago aside from the occasional support call everything works quite well.

As for my mom, I sat her down way back and told her she needed to move off of Windows XP (support was running out). I explained to her that she could learn Windows 7 and eventually 10 (8 was already a known dud by then) or she could switch to a “Traditional” desktop paradigm that resembled XP closely where she’d only had to relearn once and then keep running it forever, so I moved her to MATE.

While most issues she had with incompatibilities could be solved (and often remotely by me just via ssh) there was one MFP that just wouldn’t scan properly (I’ve scoured the web for guides and sane drivers etc.) in the end I set up a Dual boot Windows (with a nice "switch to Windows " script right in the pinned apps) just so she could scan from there (scans automatically saved on a NAS share that was also available in Linux so she could use the scanned documents there). These days the MFP died and she got a new one that will actually scan in Linux but I kept the dual boot just in case (though I doubt she ever uses it).

I used to provide tech support for the family, and tried to move them to Linux to make them easier to support (similar simple use cases)

Thry weren’t interested so now requests for help get a genuine “Sorry, I don’t use Windows so I can’t help”

Not Windows, but I rooted/cracked an old Chromebook for my mother and put Gallium OS on it because newer ChromeOS wasn’t suported anymore. She was able to take care of affairs with it when my Dad passed and uses it daily still to keep in touch and manage her life. 90% of what she does takes place in Firefox, so as long as an OS has that and some basic utilities like a calc and text editor, she’s good to go.

A $150 laptop bought in 2013 still able to accomplish modern tasks. It makes me sick thinking of the throwaway society we have created. When I pass by the neighborhood dumpster and see an entire perfectly fine big screen LCD TV with just a couple bad capacitors in the power supply. When I see entire vapes with batteries littering the ground. When Microsoft decides to arbitrarily kill off an entire previous generation of PCs with TPM.

We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

My parents moved to Linux on their own accord: Dad just wanted something that stays the same, and doesn’t try to exploit him, so he’s been a happy Debian & XFCE user for about a decade now; Mom never used Windows, so she’s happy with Debian & GNOME I was a Debian user (and developer) back when they switched to Linux, and Debian is where they stayed. Dad’s in IT, so he can manage both systems fine, most of the time. I need to unfuck it from time to time, when Dad decides it is a good idea to try and install the latest LibreOffice Ubuntu arm64 .deb package on his x86_64 Debian oldstable, throwing whatever --force flags at dpkg he can find, but other than that, they have everything they need, are happy with their choices, and need very little support from me.

In my own household, Linux is the only system to begin with (apart from a handful of Android phones we all hate, and an XBox, which is slowly getting replaced by a Linux mini PC). I’ve been a Linux user since late 1996, and I purposefully only bought hardware that works decently with Linux, so setting up scanners, printers and the like are a breeze.

Wife saw my setup, how I operate it mostly with the keyboard (she hates the mouse more than I do!), wanted the same, so I built her something similar (NixOS + Wayland + niri + firefox + geary). She never had her own computer before, but did use Windows at work from time to time. She didn’t want to use it on her laptop, though. She wanted something tailor built for her, for her very reluctant computer-usage. So Linux it is! She doesn’t hate it, which is the best I can accomplish with anything computer-related when it comes to her. I’m maintaining her laptop, but that too, requires little work. I just update it from time to time. She’s loving that she can send a print job from her laptop, from the living room, to the printer in my work room.

Kids played with both the xbox, and the gaming mini pc I built, and much prefer the latter, because it is easier to navigate, it is faster (using cheaper hardware), it is more stable, so when they’re old enough to get their own computers, they want Linux too, and I shall abide. Luckily, while schools around here are rather windows-oriented, they have to accommodate Linux users too, so the kids will be more than fine with their Linux computers, even for school tasks. Whether they’ll end up maintaining their computers or not remains to be seen. If they want to, I’ll teach them how to.

My stepmoms aunt had a super slow laptop with Windows that I took and installed Linux Mint on and she is super happy with it. It’s like a brand new computer for her!

She only uses her computer to pay bills and check Facebook and she haven’t called me once to complain. She only tells me that it’s working great.

I plan to install Linux Mint for my mom too in the future. I don’t think my dad would be able to handle it tho. He barley know his way around the computer but he knows enough to do his work and I don’t want to mess up his workflow.

I can’t imagine switching everyone in my family to Linux. I think it’d be too much to support lol.

My wife is still on Windows on her own laptop. But for watching TV, she has been using Linux successfully with an appropriate GUI (vdr, mythtv, Kodi, Androidtv…) for 15 years or so :)