this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Hello, i have task to install a system for elderly person without much technical knowlegde (never used pc, no windows or mac).

They need text processing, calculator and maybe spreadsheet.

Want to disable anything else (setting panel, file browser, web browser, launcher, dock, terminal, login select, etc.) that not needed, all important thing only from desktop. Should not be able to go anywhere where not know what to do. But not permanent, might need to fix machine if ever break.

Is there distro or config i can work off? Or need to start from scratch? What program you recommend?

Thank you for any answer or recommendation

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I get visits multiple times a month because a Eula or something shows up on phones or tablets asking them to accept whatever. You know, the stuff nobody reads and just clicks accept on. Old people sometimes have trouble discerning where messages come from, anything from a pop up to a disclaimer for an update is "my phone asking me something".

Chrome OS is still corporate BS. They will manage to confuse people with legalese. I have elder neighbours come to me confused that were literal pages into that BS. I always tell them they can just accept everything google/microsoft/apple asks of them, but that’s the problem, they can’t tell where it’s coming from. To them it’s just a legal contract showing up when they wanted to read their mails, it’s scary and they rather want me to check everything is ok.

Aurora is better for them. No legalese pop ups, fully automatic updates(no "click to accept", "when do you want to schedule the update" or even an info that an update happened). I just tell them to make sure they turn off their PC at night and they will boot into the update next morning, never being the wiser. It just works.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Regarding ChromeOS being corporate, it is nearly all open source. You have to login with a Google Account, but once in, you don’t have to use any Google products.

You can use Firefox, Fastmail, whatever you like.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I tried older relatives on Ubuntu and ChomeOS and for the less technical ones, ChromeOS was best.

For ones with confidence and a growth mindset to learn new things, Ubuntu was fine.

If in doubt, I would recommend ChromeOS.