When I was visiting my wife’s family for Thanksgiving, my father-in-law told me that his laptop was telling him that if he didn’t upgrade to Win11 he be vulnerable to all sorts of malware. They’re both retired and on a fixed income so he was panicking over buying a new machine. I put Mint on his existing laptop and walked him through its use. Fingers crossed that he’ll be able to handle it. I haven’t had any support calls from him yet but I’ll find out how it’s going when I see him in a few days.
Does anyone have any tips for supporting older family members on Linux if they have absolutely no experience with it?
TeamViewer, or similar.
My mom has been running Linux Mint for 10+ years now. She is not tech savvy, but also not helpless. She has needed help a handful of times, usually with a printer.
Trying to talk anybody through support remotely is a PITA, Linux or Windows. So NAT-triendly remote desktop is very helpful.
Isn’t TeamViewer closed-source? Why are you not recommending RustDesk?
I wasn’t aware of RustDesk. I’ve looked for usable solutions in the past and was never saw it or anything else like TeamViewer.
The nature of the problem seems to require a hosted service. So TeamViewer fit the bill and was free for this use case. But I’ll have a look at RustDesk now that I’m aware of it.
All that being said, I don’t mind closed-source. I’m an open-source zealot, but I’m not Richard Stallman. I use Linux at work so I’ll use whatever software gets the job done at the end of the day. I’m just glad to see more software work on Linux.
It’s been shady, at least in the past
Oh, because of the China drama? I read up on that and that seems to have been cleared since then. Even so, there is also HopToDesk. I just think we should always suggest open-source here whenever possible.