Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kde (368 mails)

[oldcpu <oldcpu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have similar experience wrt my 85+ year old mother. She has been using 
openSUSE for 5 or 6 years now. Originally with a dual boot, she was 90% 
Windows-XP and 10% openSUSE GNU/Linux. Now its the other way around, and 
she is 90% openSUSE and 10% Windows-XP.  Like your wife, my mother is 
definitely non-techy and I do the updates (remotely a continent away as 
she is in Canada and I in Europe). I train her via vnc when I take over 
her desktop and talk to her on Skype at the same time.  OpenSUSE with 
KDE4 works well for her.

She is currently still running openSUSE-11.3 with the 'stock' KDE4 and 
will likely remain running that until September this year, when I may 
visit Canada and update her PC to openSUSE-12.1's KDE.

So I believe with the appropriate level of support, and an 
attitude/willingness to accept support (which my my 85+ year old mother 
has) then openSUSE can be used by beginners.

A positive spin, with a lets ALL roll up our sleeves and help approach 
(and NOT just the developers/packagers do all the work and the users 
only complain, but rather an approach where ALL do some sort of work and 
contribution), seems to me to be the best approach.

Lee

aka oldcpu


On 01/07/2012 09:04 PM, Bob Williams wrote:
> On 07/01/12 16:48, Roger Luedecke wrote:
> [snip]
> > YaST is a replacement. YaST is the original way... and I'm not sure we
> > need to coddle users since we claim to be not for beginners anyway.
> Who says openSUSE is not for beginners? SuSE/openSUSE was my first
> distro (version 6.x), and I've never used any other for serious work. My
> computers are used for the usual mail/browsing/office/games and as a
> hobby. The latter is one of the reasons I prefer linux to the other
> operating system.
>
> Beginners have to climb a learning curve, whatever system they start on,
> but I don't think openSUSE is particularly harder in that respect. My
> wife, who is very non-techy, made the transition from Windows to oS
> fairly painlessly, though I am still responsible for applying patches
> and upgrades. But that was no different with Windows, and on linux I can
> ssh into her machine and su to do those tasks - and yes, we do still
> live in the same house :)
>
> Just my (possibly OT) 2p worth.
>
> Bob

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