Linux

I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him.

Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he'd bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that's what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus.

Since then, he's called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected.

Dad's in his 80's and was a cop with an associate's degree; he's never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that's OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I'm stupidly loyal to Arch.

I'm sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that's super frustrating.

This EFI thing is literally squarely a Microsoft induced problem.

I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.

Linux has problems, but I'm so glad I don't have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he'd consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.

He didn't even know about onedrive, just phoned me like "The Internet isn't working, what's wrong?" and of course onedrive is the last thing I'd have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.

Much nicer now his OS doesn't do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.

Great example of why a safety net is required.

Yes hopefully the "base" setup works once you installed it, hopefully manage through some updates, some even tinkerings... but what happens when it break?

Windows (despite all the criticism, and I'm one of the first to complain about Microsoft the corporation) usually has been fallback mechanisms. It can usually rollback an update. It usually has a hidden recovery partition. It usually has an alternative medium to recover (e.g. USB stick, CD-ROM back in the days, etc).

So... you genuinely did try to help your mother but do not give up. Try instead to provide a better safety net so that she is genuinely safer. In fact I would recommend testing it together, make it a learning adventure. One way to do so would be to go there, help her fix it... then botcher the setup together! Delete system files, etc, then try again. Obviously the 1st step is insuring her own data (e.g. family photo, documents, etc) is safe.

While doing so, you might also want to setup up remote control, or not. Anyway a LOT of things to genuinely discover together.

IMHO if you do do it, she will not only appreciate the effort but assuming you do manage, she'll have a new sense of pride, both in you but also herself and share the experience with her friends. This in turn might bring more people in!

Is this a Dell machine or something similar? It’s not impossible that the internal battery has run dry, and it reset the UEFI settings. A lot of setups would refuse to work if internal storage mode has switched from AHCI to hardware RAID

Could it be a dying SSD?

It's good your mom tried. It's sad she gave up so soon. I've helped 4 people switch in the past months. I've gotten even more people curious and more open to switch. A success is not only the switch, but that people start to realize that they can. In my opinion. :-)

At least your mom was cool enough to try. I had to trick my mom into using linux by putting a macOS themed, KDE, debian on an old macbook that was identical to her dead macbook

Out of curiosity what did you install ? And what did you install it on ?

I changed my grandad onto GNU after I've distrohopped a few times on my system just so I knew how to do a system install (which is a skill in of itself no matter what OS you are installing)

All the major technical issues for install like getting to boot, display driver issues, etc are solved. Even Nvidia is reccomending people use their open source kernel modules (nvidia-open)

That was likely some kind of kdump error, interested to know what distro you used, I often advise people to use a stable but stale distro like a Debian based distro: Mint or Ubuntu is ideal for stability and ease of install.

I setup my grandad on Mint 2 years ago,was fine but decided to hop to Archlinux KDE Plasma as needed some newer stuff(if you enable the incremental backups its not hard to switch if you think a different one is a better fit), even though Archlinux has a reputation for less stability it's been pretty good the last year, avoided AUR *mostly for stability, pamac for GUI updater.

Most of what he needs is in the browser and printing. (Printer issues are OS agnostic nowadays as modern printers seem to be very anti-consumer and they mostly use software to make their money, I.E DRM on ink cartridges)

Only issues my grandad had are printer or website related.

(Detail: used the CLI installer)

(DISCLAIMER: I am a qualified computing professional who have used GNU/Linux as daily driver since 2016, for newcomers a Debian based distro would be more the route I would).