Convinced my boomer dad to switch to Linux Mint and, much to my shock, he was tech literate enough to figure everything out on his own.

I then realized the idiot was ME here. When I was a kid, my dad got into piracy because of those “YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR” things as they made him realize you can get shit for free on the internet.

My boomer dad was the one who taught me about torrenting, proxies, VPNs, burning CDs, and private trackers when I was a kid because he just loved stealing so much.

Yeah really, getting free movies is what got my dad into being more techy than the average American. He just never used Linux till like 2025.

Send them to me, I love fixing problems and researching. It’s genuinely fun for me.

My mom’s laptop was dying and as she works on it it was more and more annoying to use due to constant slowdowns and freezes, she asked me to recommend her a new laptop maybe to buy in installments.

Instead, I went ahead and pulled my mint xfce drive, jiggled it, turned it face down, then up, then down again, I slot it deep into her dell laptop, straight up no lube, then filled it up to the brim with the new OS, even though we started at 50/50 win/mint ratio, mint slowly spilled over windows, eating it up, absorbing it, ripping pieces off, just how Alice stole from Jensen. Consuming it.

Now win10 is reduced to its cuck chair, still installed, but never picked, every day it passes he falls deeper on the realization he’s not mom’s favorite’s toy anymore, and will probably never be touched or started again, unless by accident.

For a time I made “little old lady” PCs. My neighbors and customers had no money for a new machine, needed their old system to keep going.

I’d clean it up, throw in whatever extra RAM I had on hand (HA! “extra RAM”!), update the BIOS, maybe update the CPU if I had one that fit, replace the HDD with an SSD, load Linux Lite. “Here’s your browser. Here’s your email. Any questions?”

Never once got a call from those ladies to come back and fix a thing.

Linux rules for simple stuff like unattended servers and FaceBook/email machines. It’s only a PITA when you start trying to stretch out, do more.

I run Windows for my desktop, Debian Server for servers. Bring the hate! :)

This is subtle but sweet.

Linux is love, Linux is life.

Ah, good ol’ thing-thing penguin. I haven’t seen you misused in a while.

Put linux mint on my roomate’s yoga laptop. There was about 3 days intermittently peppered with questions that were easy to answer, and there hasn’t been anything since. Probably the smoothest transition I’ve seen so far.

“This is unfixable, sir. I’m sorry. D’ya wanna hear our prayer line?”.

Colors are flipped

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

ROFL Um, I just tell them to be very careful. Don’t do something you can’t understand. There is documentation out there for you to read, and don’t talk to prompt slop bots…They can’t help you. As honestly, I can do most things on my own, however, helping others is hard. Like too hard.

Now get them to install a typescript node stack with versions that actually works with the libraries they are trying to use…

Install Ubuntu, never need to support again.

For good reasons. For the best reasons.