Why would it be? It’s like Windows is OK, and Linux is not. But actually, you can do the very same thing, interface wise.

There are plenty of printers that just work, it’s been a long time I’ve seen a printer that doesn’t work. Do you know that sudo can be passwordless? It’s a completely made up problem, probably with the lack of any understanding of the system.

Take a look at the immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue. It would install updates automatically, and has the ability to always rollback to a working version. I haven’t used it long enough to have version upgrades tested. Perhaps it asks for user input. These upgrades happen twice a year.

If I was doing that these days with my current skills, I’d install some minimal version of Arch Linux and probably would remote into it once in a while to update, or invent some simple script to do the updates unattended. The lesser the packages the easier the whole task.

Also, don’t forget there’s Chrome OS which you can install on a regular PC. (It was called Chrome OS Flex last time I did that for a relative.) It’s the easiest I can remember right now. That’s for situations when all they need is actually just a browser. For those cases Chrome OS shines.

What’s specifically wrong with Linux for a grandmother? Or does she has some weird edge case with some very important niche Windows software? I’d call modern Gnome being even better than modern macOS in terms of simplicity. Telling Windows is better than macOS and Linux for a grandmother is weird. Unless the grandmother is a heavy Windows user who knows all the hotkeys and menus. If she barely uses browser with not much else, I don’t even know.

Haven’t used one myself for years (close to a decade). Installed it for a relative about 5 years ago, never maintained it ever since.

What’s wrong with it?

It worked pretty well on an ancient PC which was running some Windows 7 if not XP. Can’t remember really. The relative is about 80 years old, so all he needs is a browser. So, Chrome OS came naturally. The hardest part was, for some really stupid reason Google wants Google account password to be entered upon booting, and not some other password. PIN code didn’t work for us for some reason. The solution I took is we changed the password to his birthday (perhaps with some A letter, if it wants at least one letter to be present). The password included dots, which was trivial to enter with a Numpad. Like A1945.09.05. But personally, I just hate it. There are use cases when you can allow a computer to have no password. Here, Google forced us to use less secure password, out of convenience. I’d prefer to have my Google account having stronger password, and forcing no password of my computer at all. The potential security risk is someone breaking into the house, and surely they’ll be very dumb to steal that computer, to have … what? YouTube history of some old fart? But that’s a bit of a different story anyway.

Me, I’d rather go with some very minimal distro and maybe even kiosk-mode browser, if necessary.

Still, what’s wrong with ChromeOS? Did I miss something important? Beyond Google dropping ‘don’t be evil’ obviously.

Honestly, I don’t understand whether there’s anyone who doesn’t need normal codecs. I hate this part of Fedora, as I always need to remember to install these codecs.

So, Linux didn’t help your Stockholm’s syndrome yet.

North American English, innit?

As if Microsoft was founded just yesterday and wasn’t scamming everyone at everything for like decades, right?

Why Arch based distro then? Why not, say, Fedora? Debian. Popos.

I’d suggest you to investigate either Tailscale or similar solutions. I’m using Tailscale, and it’s really easy to set up. It can automatically connect to the VPN when you access their resource, and the internet works as well. So technically, they can be connected all the time. That’s much safer than the alternative of just opening a port, and dealing with things like CGNAT.

The alternatives to Tailscale I know about are Headscale (which you need self-hosting), Netbird, WireGuard. At least, but there are more.

And search for tunnels as well. You could utilise Cloudflare Tunnel, but I wouldn’t go that way.

I’d suggest testing waters with Tailscale as it’s the easiest, and tweak from there. They have a YouTube channel which helps at starting, I found it just recently. (I use them for a year or two now.)

If you don’t setup or activate exit node, no traffic is routed through any of your nodes. All you have is the access to the nodes. Which is what you need. I tested exit nodes only recently, they’re very easy to setup as well, but I found no practical need for my use case.

I think installing and logging in should be trivial remotely. Like hey mum, install this app, and log in (trivial with Google or Apple accounts). The rest is on you. Just test the waters yourself first, you’ll get the idea, it’s pretty straightforward. Even if it’s not what you’re looking for, you’d have more information and skills to move to the next thing.

Fair point! I just did many installs recently (a bit of a long story), and at some point just stopped even following the wiki. But if I can afford it, I simply clone my entire system, and tweak from there. Takes very little time, and I have a complete clone of my perfectly working system.

Also, theoretically, I don’t even need a backup of the system, if I have at least two laptops with mostly same system. I have, one at home with broken keyboard and no battery, which servers as my home computer connected to a display. And another one is for on the go.

That’s exactly my experience. Now I understand most things I do, and I smile at this ‘installing Arch is difficult.’ No, it’s not. I can install it without any help from the wiki, by memory. As I understand what I’m doing and why. It’s not the difficult part. The difficult part is to make it yours.

Yes, it’s exactly like this.

Do you have it detailed somewhere? A blog or something. Would be interesting to see what it looks like.

But will it install those updates during the reboot? Or will it update just to apply the updates?

As the Gnome version (non-mutable, meaning not Silverblue) does not update a thing, even a browser. It updates during the reboot, by rebooting into some special state, akin to macOS (and perhaps Windows, haven’t been using one for decades) then it reboots again.

Since the latest update of Fedora (50? I lost the count at this point) it does the reboot even when you ask to shutdown the computer after updates.

I haven’t checked whether dnf update updates things right away (like browser), mostly because that’s a shared family computer, which I don’t touch most of the time. And I try to use it as I use macOS (as a normie would use), just to check out whether it’s a viable system yet. (It mostly is, but there are weird bugs that’s easy to resolve only when you’re knowledgeable of Linux.)

But it does not do the extra reboot and install updates thing. That’s why I’m puzzled why is it there in the first place?

Hey, but in general Fedora is very good and I can recommend it. This annoying update behaviour bears some meaning for some reason, so I can tolerate that.

It’s not that the system forces you to update. It’s you who is in control. Most times updates take minutes, with version upgrades taking like half an hour (twice a year).

For some reason Fedora does the same shit when you update from the Software app. Gnome version, perhaps KDE is different. And I really don’t understand why, as dnf update does the thing as it should be.