@anthropy__dup_5828@mastodon.derg.nz
Post #646637
2026-03-14 11:57 UTC
Replies (29)
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@julianmaiz@mastodon.social 2026-03-14 12:01
@anthropy Truly the best way to reduce ewaste is to not fall into the marketing trap of buying the latest gadget every year. A good laptop on Linux can last decades, even longer if the parts are modular. Happy to know your mom is a long time Linux user. Much love! :scremcat:
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@maj@cosocial.ca 2026-03-14 13:58
@anthropy ugh I wish I had done that. Every time we visit I have to troubleshoot a bunch of Microsoft bullshit and deal with their wacky tablets..
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@Oregon_Pacifist@retro-gaiden.com 2026-03-14 14:08
@anthropy that’s really awesome!
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@bekopharm@indieweb.social 2026-03-14 14:08
@anthropy only thing I have to manually kick from time to time is Zoom. That's on Zoom tho because they can't be bothered to offer a repo like and it has to be downloaded manually. Ah well. There's probably a snap available nowadays.
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@kookie@toot.cat 2026-03-14 14:34
@anthropy I installed Fedora on my dads iMac (that stopped getting security updates) and I'm very curious how he'll be getting on with it. But this gives me hope!
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@tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud 2026-03-14 14:48
@anthropy out of curiosity, what desktop did you went for?
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@bazcook@mas.to 2026-03-14 15:42
@anthropy - it's the nearly - and over - 80 year old moms and dads and uncles and aunts (and sometimes weird neighbours in their garage) who essentially created the personal computer and the OSs and software that run on them. They probably know better than the rest of us what 'just works', and what are simply "Squirrel!" products.
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@spaceinvader@social.securitytheater.net 2026-03-14 15:49
@anthropy This is legit good news. I tried 20 years ago to repurpose my grandpa’s old tower into a Fedora machine. An OS update broke it, and the advice on forums was to SSH in and do some hand-wrangling of files. Got a gentle chiding from him every so often until Alzheimer’s took his memory about how good I am with computers except his, and he hoped “that Linex thing” wasn’t still causing trouble.
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@benfulton@fosstodon.org 2026-03-14 16:35
@anthropy What does she use it for?
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@rustoleumlove@mastodon.online 2026-03-14 16:57
@anthropy that's so awesome. i built a PC for my parents in 2004 and my father started randomly deleting files from the hard drive whenever he perceived anything was going wrong with it. so by like 2005 he had destroyed the computer's OS beyond my capabilities to repair
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@paco@infosec.exchange 2026-03-14 18:41
@anthropy We look forward to her first open source contribution. 😜 Does she prefer emacs or vi? Tabs or spaces? You did inform her that she can’t use #Linux without having opinions on these things, right? 😂
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@liebach@mastodon.art 2026-03-14 18:47
@anthropy Pretty much the same situation for my mother, except Ubuntu, an we had to get her a new ThinkPad at one point.
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@phil_stevens@mastodon.nz 2026-03-14 18:49
@anthropy My 85-y-o mum is visiting and got a call from a good friend in Queensland yesterday. She made it a point to tell her to download Signal so that they could stay in touch effortlessly.
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@sebsauvage@framapiaf.org 2026-03-14 19:00
@anthropy Nice 👌 congrats
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@armando@rollenspiel.social 2026-03-14 19:16
@anthropy hehe, my mom as well. On Linux Mint singe around ten years. I live like 6 hours away and no Problems.
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@thomastc@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-14 19:27
@anthropy My wife is still using her 2008-ish ThinkPad, onto which we installed LUbuntu when its Windows version became "obsolete". I think it lacks video encoding hardware because Zoom and friends are not working well, but for basic use it's still doing its job. Oh and we installed a second hand SSD at some point. Not sure if it would still be usable on a spinning rust hard drive, with software being the size it is these days.
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@unicandun@retro.pizza 2026-03-14 19:59
@anthropy Life as it should be! 😍🤓
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@JaggyJeff@mastodon.social 2026-03-14 20:09
@anthropy Your story is even better than mine ❤️ My then 70-year-old dad wanted to get on the Internet a decade ago. I got him a 16-inch Dell laptop and installed Ubuntu on it. He has been using it to this day even though the battery is cooked. Only had one upgrade that failed on me in the mean time. I am grateful to my younger self for all the bullets dodged.
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@arosano@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-03-14 20:20
@anthropy Moms rock!
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@cm@chaos.social 2026-03-14 21:56
@anthropy I gave my mum a used dell laptop with debian for her 70th birthday, which was over a decade ago, and I can say the same thing. Does everything she needs (web browsing and text processing). The battery's toast, but she only uses it at her desk anyways.
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@SpaceLifeForm@infosec.exchange 2026-03-14 23:13
@anthropy Clearly not broken. Do not replace. I'm talking about your mom.
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@drewtowler@mas.to 2026-03-14 23:59
@anthropy Fedora - especially with KDE - is indeed fairly wonderful.
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@andrewdwilliams@infosec.exchange 2026-03-15 00:15
@anthropy @mainframed767 Fuck yeah it is. Tech that gets out of the way so you can just use it. Amazing.
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@Byte@rage.love 2026-03-15 00:50
@anthropy that's an impressively long service history for that machine and that install!
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@rl_dane@polymaths.social 2026-03-15 15:41
@anthropy If she uses it plugged in a lot, show her how to set the charging threshold to protect the battery from wear. 👍🏻
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@jrredho@mastodon.world 2026-03-17 00:18
@anthropy What this highlights in my mind is just how straight forward, well documented, and reliable the #Fedora upgrade process is. I used #Debian stable for several years on my personal computers, and I did not have a similar experience with upgrades on it. It is true, though, that those only happened every two years.
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@johnlorimer@mastodon.social 2026-03-17 22:29
@anthropy Similar experience - My mother (83) has been on a Linux desktop for 5-6 years. A real beautiful thing happened when a phone scammer called the house and wanted her to install remote software. "Oh I am using this Linux thing" She loves it, and hardly ever needs help.
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@Baa@mk.absturztau.be 2026-03-14 14:45
@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz stop upgrading hardware. Computing peaked 20 years ago 23,000 versions of windows can go to hell
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@crow@irlqt.net 2026-03-14 18:53
@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz yeah i don't really understand where the meme of linux being unreliable is it's more reliable than windows for sure macos is very stable but only targets one type of machine and architecture so yeah i would hope so a distros like fedora have always worked amazing ime