Setting Up Your Computer Idiot

[Lemur]

I've been working on restoring a borked computer for a client. While I wait for Windows XP to reinstall, this puts me in a thoughtful frame of mind:

What OS is best for a computer idiot? For that aunt of yours, or your little brother, or your parents, or your neighbor, or the small business owner who can't be bothered ... what's the best solution?

Possibilities:

Windows

Advantages: Common, well-known, drivers for everything, every app known to man will run without modification. Most problems will yield to a quick Google and a bit of head-scratching.

Disadvantages: Terrible at uninstalling things. Commonly infected. Hard to secure. Can easily incur the kinds of problems that are fixable only by a re-install of Windows. For some reason the people who won't do updates are always the same people who don't back up their data or maintain a restore point.

OS X

Advantages: Very hard to bork. Shallow learning curve for Windows users. Broad range of commercial apps. Virus and malware a non-issue. Maintenance consists of fixing disk permissions twice a year.

Disadvantages: You gotta pay the Apple tax. User may have a custom app that is Win x86 exclusive (and don't talk to me about dual-boot configs when dealing with an idiot). Local support guys are usually Windows-only, so support can be an issue if the user manages to do something exceptionally stupid.

Linux

Advantages: Free as in beer. Loads of open-source apps. Newest distros of Ubuntu get very high marks for user-friendliness. Does wonders for older machines. No DRM or licensing weirdness. Very good handling of non-admin users, no need to grant Joe Web Browser admin rights as there can be in Windows.

Disadvantages: Spotty commercial app support. Many geeks not familiar with CLI or *nix fundamentals. If a peripheral such as a wireless card is not supported out of the box, can be a dicey bit of business. Computer idiots may be scared of OS.

Anyway. This is far from comprehensive (or necessarily accurate). What are your thoughts? What to recommend or install for the computer idiot(s) in your life?

[drone]

I guess it would depend on what they use the computer for. If it's just email/surfing/FB, I would probably have to push them towards iOS (iPad/iPhone). Apple is doing a good job here keeping the idiots connected without saddling tech-savvy relatives with their issues. If incomptent but needing serious work done (need the power/screen size/keyboard), again I would suggest Apple in the form of OS X. Linux and Windows are for those of us that have some semblance of a clue, and are masochistic enough to deal with the maintenance tasks these require. These days the only reason I would recommend Windows is for gaming. If they don't game but want a PC-like experience, Linux is the better option. No M$ tax, more secure, free as in beer and speech.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Put it this way: my gran now uses Debian, but I doubt she knows it despite the fact that each time she turns the computer on the Debian logo and name are prominently displayed on the screen. Before that she used Puppy Linux. Before that she used XP, but here antivirus kindly decided that she really didn't need a user32.dll and cleaned it up for her.

The difference between Puppy Linux and XP has been negligible apparently. The difference between Puppy and Debian is similarly negligible: what she didn't understand with XP she still doesn't understand now. Try as I might, explanations don't “stick”. She does what she knows, and as long as that works she is happy. Once something out of the ordinary happens (be that a degrading eyesight so fonts look smaller, or an ISP deciding to send out useless bulk mail to their customers warning them of the dangers of the Internet) she won't bother with trying anything herself but come straight to me.

Taking her as the model computer idiot, the thing to do is simple: chose the OS which gives you the best guarantee that what you set up now will work exactly the same tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Then set it up with apps, configure it, configure peripherals, ideally the user touches nothing.

[caravel]

Put it this way: my gran now uses Debian, but I doubt she knows it despite the fact that each time she turns the computer on the Debian logo and name are prominently displayed on the screen.

Debian stable is probably the ideal release for such people. It never breaks and requires minimum maintenance. cron-apt is useful in such scenarios as well: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/cron-apt

Bear in mind that squeeze/testing is currently frozen, and will probably go stable early next month, so at this point it's often worth installing it rather than stable (soon to be old-stable).