Tonight I am installing Kubuntu on the gfs machine. Once she is comfortable with that, and the support ends for our version prolly going with Debian. Going to remove her windows drive (256 or 512GB) as there is only 1 m.2 port on the board, and replace it with a 1tb.

Her needs are simple, make Logitec G13 work (works and tested on my machine for months), Make ESO and addons work (Lutris has its own installer for ESO YAY! Minion has a linux version.), and minecraft java (found in app manager).

Now, she has some knock off razor mouse with buttons under the thumb, maybe the razorx software or whatever it’s called will work on her mouse?, this may be a slight pain point. I am hoping this will work out and she will be happy with her (new) pc, we are preserving her windows as a fall back if she hates it. I have a short video lined up to teach her the linux file system. She won’t be doing anything command line, for now, except to start the G13. Gonna leave her with the dolphin file manager as it is difficult to get elevated privileges compared to nautalis(sp?) where it is a simple checkbox click. Anything else to suggest here?

I can mostly teach her what she needs to know as we go, she is a smart cookie and has picked up everything I taught her for windows and networking so far so should not be an issue for her, but if you guys have any suggestions on tutorial vids for non power users or other things I can do to make this even more seamless it would be appreciated.

Edit: Thank you all for your input, very much appreciated. I will keep monitoring for new posts

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    1·
    15 days ago

    Thoughts as someone who’s migrated two gfs and one wife:

    • Don’t consider distrohopping. Install something that can be maintained for 10 years through upgrades. If you go with Kubuntu, stay with Kubuntu. If you’re planning on Debian go straight to Debian and do the extra work to make it comfortable.

    • Plan the install to be dumbproof and trivial to maintain. E.g. no separate partitions for this or that which could run out of space. If you need separate /boot, oversize it. You don’t want to deal with failed updates due to space.

    • Install a Windows VM for all the corner cases you aren’t thinking of at the moment. Share the home dir with Windows under some drive like Z: and teach her to use it. Use built-in hypervisor like virt-manager. It doesn’t have 3D acceleration but it’s problem-free when it comes to upgrades over time since there aren’t kernel module compilations.

    • Use web “apps” liberally to fill the gaps where native apps are missing.

    • Don’t use external repositories unless absolutely needed. You want updates and upgrades trivial and boring.

    You want to show that this system is better than Windows. Any issues and defects would be counted against it even if it was your fuckup. So go boring, trivial and stable.