Okay so let me tell you a little story. I have a friend who is 13 years old. Her computer broke and she asked me to fix it. So I took a look at it and saw that the hard drive was broke. So called her dad, and told him that the hard drive was broke, and since there was no back up, I was going to have to reinstall the operating system. I told him that windows 7 was about $70 on new egg, or I could install LinuxLite. I was told that $70 dollars was out of the question. So I grab my spare hard drive, and put LinuxLite on it. I gave her back her laptop, showed her the basics, and went on my way. After she had been using it for a couple months I asked her how it was going. She said that it works just fine and that she wasn't having any problems.
Now if a thirteen year old can do it, why do people think it is so hard?
For the majority of what people do (browse the web, email, creating documents) its not that hard for most people to click on FF or Chrome if installed. My grandma fits in that "majority" and that's why her computer is running Zorin OS, feels like windows but won't have to worry about having her computer get utterly destroyed by malware. Has it been perfect? No. But I just install what she needs by remote desktop.
So if its installed correctly then yes most people won't have an issue, but it's when you start introducing 3rd party software and hardware into the mix that things can get ugly.
It's really not that bad, quit complaining about it being different and just do it. My mum uses Debian now, I've shown her minimal of how to use it just the basics. The rest can be familiarized with and learnt with a bit of clicking around
Bonus is I've had no issues to resolve since its so stable and works so well out of the box, no slow downs, malware, crashing, etc. which I'd have heard at least something of by now a few times over if she was on Windows 7 still.
You're targeting the wrong person. I use Linux.. Manjaro to be exact. the reason Linux is not user friendly is because you can't do everything from the GUI. simple as that.
For someone who just needs a computer to browse the internet or just get some content consumption done, then by all means there's no reason if you can't afford a Windows License why you shouldn't use Linux. however just in general from a much broader perspective, Linux is far from user friendly. the fact that for some things you HAVE to use the command line is proof enough. if it were user friendly, everything would be able to be done from the GUI. which for alot of things is just not the case.
And for the record, I wasn't complaining. I was making a suggestion.
Gnome was my first GUI on Linux. I think it's pretty easy to pick up. I think Cinnamon and Plasma (the best DEs to begin with IMO) mimics it closely... until you mod them both
Gnome 2 was by far in my opinion the easiest Desktop to learn. That's what I used when I first came to Linux back in the Ubuntu 10.04 days. Then developers started to get crazy and decided to move to Gnome 3, which is A. ugly by default and B. weird to use at first.
Also wait till she has to go farther in High School. In one of my Chem. classes we were given some trial software to make atoms that was only MAC/PC compatible. WINE was not cutting the cheese, so I had to torrent... I mean borrow on the shortest of terms Win. 7 from the bay.
Also what you could of done was downloaded the .iso from the Windows website, downloaded it and then used the product key on the machine or bought one off of ebay for like $20.
The 13 year old girl probably doesn't do anything else then browse the web. That's why she can use it. You could have downloaded Windows .iso for free easily enough.
I can't use Linux because I want to do more advanced things. I installed Vivaldi which was not in the default repository and later on when i tried to update the OS + all packages it would give me an error because of the 3rd party software. Do I know how to fix it? No.
I tried Slackware in the 90's. It was insanely fast on my 486 but kinda hard to use. Linux boasted it was posix compliant which to me was nuthin to boast about. I liked Dos commands much better. 15 years later my X3 needs a third MB which only has two mem slots so only 4 gig ram. Windows 7 is worse then compu-torture (nickname for CompuServe) on a slow modem. Google "easiest Linux for first time users" and try Linux Mint. I was blown away how easy simple and POLISHED it was. It is an OS that people work on on there free time. It also flew on my x3 and was faster then some hardware upgrades I have done. We used it for over a year for the same reason I drove a car with an old inspection sticker and three brake lines instead of 4. We got by. I really liked the mem test in grub to make sure those last two 8 yr old mem sticks were healthy. Open Arena was a blast! Now have a 7850k with Windows 10, Wife hates it and misses Mint:) I am thinking of doing a Linux only build buying older nvidea cards like a 740 760 or 560 I saw for 70 bucks
Now a days people just say BAE when referring to their one day wife. Which turns out to mean something else in Danish. Its a good thing she is not that, or I would be on the side of a highway, maybe under a tarp or something like that.
But pre-wifey does have a nice ring to it. I'm gonna start using that.
