Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
Couldn’t disagree more. Do non-techies need anything more than a browser nowadays? Maybe a word processor? The process of turning on and opening a web browser on Mint are practically no different from Windows. Hardware will plug and play just the same. Using printers is equally intuitive (ie, not very). In fact, I can find firefox on GNOME by just pressing the Win key and typing “internet” or “browser”.
Both are probably equally likely to run into incomprehensible tech problems that require techie intervention.
Just connecting to the internet on various networks can be confusing. And they’re going to need to periodically upgrade system packages, or they’ll be vulnerable to various exploits. Even if you set up auto-upgrades, occasionally some things will need manual intervention.
I still don’t see how it’s any more confusing than Windows. Cinnamon does it almost exactly the same way as windows, and typically detects network sign-in requirements better. Auto-updates work absolutely fine, and again I’ve not seen them need manual intervention with any more frequency than Windows.