My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
“Is this a virus?”
Your 12-year-old brother is more security-conscious than most of the adults I work with.
Non techies have two settings. Either everything is a virus or nothing is a virus.
Still better security consciousness than 99% of the population.
Nah, my father is one of those who thinks everything is a virus, especially emails. And so he installs all kind of “clean your PC from viruses”-software …
My dad is in his 70s, but he is thankfully rather aware of these kinds of things. He forwards me messages or calls me to ask “is this legitimate?”
He’s aware of computer viruses, but I think he’s really on the lookout for scams, which is an interesting and effective approach.
My brother is the kind of people that installs stuff without reading a single option, just ‘next next next’ until the installer closes.
My older sibling did something similar - getting Ubuntu installed on my very first laptop (a 9" netbook) back in 2008 and replacing windows XP. But be warned: it is a slippery slope. At the time , I just wanted a computer that I could take class notes on (high school), and never wanted to touch programming or the terminal. Now I have a PhD in computer science. I still don’t use Arch though.
Tangent, what’s it like going for grad and post grad in computer science? I’ve wanted to try teaching for the longest time but I learned very little new material over the course of my Bachelor’s and the only thing that made it worth my time was the math content lol
The further you go, the more specialized it gets. There are people I know doing their PhDs in CS, but it was pretty much just straight math. I’m now an expert in a very specific area of robotics. But it’s only worth it if you have a specific reason to go to grad school, like for a particular career path. If it’s just because you like learning, it’s not worth it. There’s a big opportunity cost.
Totally fair. Thank you!
He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
Your brother is the wise guy of the bell curve
Is this a made-up story? Be honest
The kid’s name? Little Bobby Tables.
Not op but I lived with a younger nephew for some years. He looked up to me in every aspect and if I introduced him to something he would learn it to talk about it later. I unfortunately just introduced him to League of Legends, I was too young and wasn’t into linux myself.
From now on I’m only refering to arch as “the nerd OS”
IDK about plasma, but in GNOME, if you search for PowerPoint, it shows LibreOffice Impress as a result.
I was looking for a similar comment. Plasma does exactly that too. These are probably provided from this line in its
.desktop
file:Keywords=Slideshow;Slides;OpenDocument Presentation;Microsoft PowerPoint;Microsoft Works;OpenOffice Impress;odp;ppt;pptx;
Linus surely just stages things for clicks. No one with his experience could be that dumb.
He played dumb on purpose and it was infuriating. Even since I’ve been using Linux, its become so much easier to install and use. He must think his viewers are idiots if that’s what he was trying to act like.
An amazing story! I doubt I ever have kids, but if I do I’ll do something like this. God knows what sort of dumbed down tech crap they’ll be fed in school.
How to copy paste from chatgpt 4 will ne furture
I use NerdOS BTW.
(That’s fantastic, I absolutely love it.)
You taught your brother well! I’m glad he is having a positive experience with it.
I don’t think I want to meet a 12 year old who uses power point. Jk lol
They all use it if they want to pass school, so you are out of luck.
Lots of kids have to present their school projects etc using powerpoint or similar.
I still maintained that Linus fucked up those Linux videos on purpose. Not sure why but for a guy in the tech industry he really played dumb.
Really pissed me off. What has he got against Linux?
Blaming Linus for breaking Linux is what’s wrong with the Linux community. You guys are so blind to the obvious glaring issues with Linux Desktop that any time something goes wrong, it must have been the user who did something stupid.
Sure, you CAN get it working the first time without issues, but the amount of times I tried Linux Desktop without any issues is 0. Every single time I installed Linux, I had some kind of breaking issue. I have tried multiple times between 2007 and 2021 and I’ll likely try again soon, but don’t kid yourself that people “play dumb” or something. Linux is as stable as the user makes it, and with instable, fragile, incompetent users (like most new users) come a fragile OS that cannot be relied upon.
I’m 100% sure if I try to install Ubuntu Desktop right now on my desktop, I’ll again encounter some BS thing that just doesn’t work like it should. Maybe the audio won’t work, or bluetooth just drops out constantly, or it randomly freezes, or YT videos don’t play at any decent framerate. Maybe everything works fine, but in 4 days some random thing doesn’t. And once some thing doesn’t work, you’ll have to waddle through a sea of sudo commands that you have no clue what they’re doing and you either fix the issue or break something else.
Note that I specifically mention Linux Desktop every time. Linux as a Server is great.
It’s true, I’m somebody who has run DIY distros daily for years and decided to try out Debian on a spare computer recently. I couldn’t even update the system after the initial install. It took me like forty minutes to find a thread which explained to me that Debian 12 has a bug with some raspi firmware that requires you to delete three files before apt will work, and there is 0 indication on the paths themselves, just people who have figured it out and were generous enough to share the knowledge. You can’t blame new users for those things, we as a community need to improve the software and the attitudes
don’t blame Linus
incompetent users
Which one is it?
All those claims you make about things not working in 2023 is ridiculous. I’ve been using various distros since 2009 and maybe you could have claimed those things back then. But if you can’t make Linux work at least as easily as windows in 2023, that’s on you.
Linus demonstrated his willful ignorance right from when he ignored that warning in the command prompt.
Linux: WARNING DONT DO THIS Linus: well I guess I’m going to have to do that. Linux: breaks Linus: Linux sucks
Fanboys: LINUX SUX LINUX SUX LINUX SUX LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Linux is spreading among gen z. Source: I’m 13 and use NixOS, and my friend who’s around the same age as me also uses it.
Removed by mod
Based teach me how 2 package and module
Based.
Removed by mod
wholesome
I mean, the outcome speaks for itself. Although I would likely have gone for Gnome instead of KDE for somebody who is completely new to Linux and not exactly techy. I use KDE myself, but I have to say that the out-of-the-box look and feel of Gnome is a lot more polished.
Yeah, I installed KDE because it functions similarly to Windows. But something like Budgie would be ok too I guess
Also, I think young people like theming. My brother uses KDE’s theme store a lot
This is a mistake people make. GTK themes in community are amazing to the point many have made up straight clones of LXqt, KDE, XFCE and other DEs for GNOME, and are installable with 2-3 clicks. Choosing installed themes via GNOME Tweaks is a matter of 2 clicks, drop down and select.