A couple of months ago I put Zorin 17 on a 12 year old laptop for my son to use for homework.
Tonight was the first time he'd used it, he'd never used Linux before, just windows.
I had it set up with the 'windows' theme and it was dead simple to get him going, literally 5 minutes and it was familiar enough for him to know what he was doing.
Showed him the libre office alternatives and straight away he felt at home with them due to their similarity to ms office. He had one question about resizing an image in writer but that was it. Homework done with no fuss and he even even managed to print it out without any intervention from me.
It also ran plenty fast enough for his needs and felt reasonably snappy. It was a high spec laptop for its time, but still very impressive given its age - Asus N55SF, Core i7, 2.2GHz, 16GB RAM, also now has SSD drive.
I also recall that installing Zorin was a breeze and everything just worked first time, no faffing with drivers.
Incidentally the laptop is a month older than he is!
All in all it showed just what a great job Zorin have done in making that transition as straight forward as possible even for non-techies.
I chose it for myself for the same reasons, although I am a techie I still like to make things easier for myself by keeping what can be made familiar. It's been about 3 months now and I don't miss windows even one tiny little bit. Computer is dual boot but I honestly can't remember the last time I booted into windows.
I like hearing such success stories such as this. Your post echoed what I have believed, since I joined Linux many years ago. Linux has evolved so much now, that it is a full fledged GUI operating system, that can is capable of doing pretty much everything that Windows can. The difference?
Linux is open source, FLOSS and FOSS. Linux is an operating system for you, not for a big corporation ill gotten gains. Linux equals freedom. I am glad to hear that not only have you been enjoying Linux, but so has your son, with very few questions necessary. Cause as long as he knows how to use Windows, he knows how to use Linux.
Curious, what type of printer do you use, Canon? And I agree with you, one of the many improvements to Linux, since the 2000's, is the improvement to printer driver support these days. I am really happy for you and your son, and I thank you for sharing!
Did the same thing a week or 2 ago with a 12-13 years old hp laptop. Everything worked out of the box. Without the need to install 1 single driver. If i would install Windows on this machine i am busy for 1-2 hours. Linux it only took me around 10-15 minutes. All my devices are running Linux now, i deleted all windows partitions on 3 notebooks.
Unfortunately Zorin did not get installed on an old E6500 notebook from Dell a few years back. I replaced the CMOS battery, upgraded from 2 Gb to a max of 8 Gb, upgraded the DVD/CD-ROM to an 8x DVD-RW and replaced the 170 Gb HDD for a Crucial M.2 1 Tb SSD. Zorin Education installed but kept freezing. The final choice was MX-Linux 23.1 KDE. Rock Solid, and manually added Education packages for my eldest. However, their Desktop running Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit became E.O.L. a few months later. This got upgraded to Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (is a Teaching Assistant and needs specific apps for producing material for class) and felt better to have Windows 11 installed due to E.O.L. of 10 occurring in 2025 so the hotbay drive that had FerenOS on it was failing so the SSD was put in the Desktop for Win 11 which by M$ criteria was not valid, but I got it installed anyway! The notebook had to have it's old hard drive reinstalled and MX-Linux 23.1 KDE installed. My eldest was admitted to CCU on life support due to Lupus 6 years ago. She suffers from chronic fatigue, brain fog, fibromyalgia, anxiety and vision problems requiring white text on black background in font 14. On a notebook this doesn't scale correctly so made it 16 pts, Comic Sans. The biggest task was ensuring I could apply this through every element of Evolution. As it was Plasma 5.27 it was a cinch to alter Font settings globally very easily.
So sad to hear this . Must be though living with all these symptoms. My wife also has fibromyalgia, she has good days around summer but after that very tired when cold times arrive, she can’t remember stuff well (forgets things), mood switches and pain in her body (alot). I love my wife, but sometimes it is hard living with her (you probably know what i mean).
lol i just wish for an "old" machine with that specs.
i'm on a pentium dual core with 4gig ram , but , it's fast also , and also didn't have to do anything after installing , everything worked out the box .
( i have a samsung rv510 lappy with SSD )
happy Linux'ing to ur son
For simple use cases it pretty much is plug & play now.
Setting it up for me was quite a tribulation though as I have much more complex and exacting requirements! And there was the learning curve of setting up Linux desktop I'm environment.
Most of the time I didn't mind as I looked at it as investment in learning, you're only properly going to learn by getting your hands dirty and having to worth through problems yourself.
The printer is a WiFi canon ts705, almost certain I didn't install anything specific for it. Hate the printer though, as I do all printers!
It's my old, old work computer (I'm a web developer). My policy has always been to buy as high spec as I can afford so that the machine won't need replacing so soon.
Although when I got it was only 8gb ram & mechanical HDD. Removed the CDROM to put the SSD in. I think the single biggest difference an upgrade has made, performance of SSD compared to HDD is like night & day.
Setting up new machines is a massive time sink and it takes me months to get a new machine to a state I'm happy with.
I'm interested to see if it will be any quicker with Linux when the time comes.
Son is showing some interest in computers, we've done a few raspberry pi projects together. Can't see him tinkering with it in the same that I would have at his age though...
I think this may be a good excuse to learn about shell scripts. You can have something setup pretty quickly and entirely automated. Personally, I like to use Ansible as it's far more declarative and easier to work with, but it does take some learning.
The neat part is that you don't have to automate every single thing. Between installs, there are things that I no longer want setup in the same way, either because I'm bored of them or found a better alternative. So, just stick to the main things that you know you will use. This is especially true of things that are prone to change over time, between installations or even between hardware e.g., drivers.
You can take a look at my Ansible setup but I must warn you, this is still highly experimental and aimed at my particular use case. There are plenty of things that don't quite work just yet as I haven't had the time to thoroughly test them. But, it can give you at least a sense on how things can be structured (there's more than one way to do it):
Some materials that I highly recommend are Ansible for DevOps, a really nice walkthrough on all things Ansible and kept up to date. There's also this playlist which is by the same author, a little dated by now perhaps but the fundamentals are still there, more than enough to get started.
If you prefer shorter videos that effectively talk about the same thing, I also like this although it's a bit more basic. Still, more than enough to get started:
. Must be though living with all these symptoms. My wife also has fibromyalgia, she has good days around summer but after that very tired when cold times arrive, she can’t remember stuff well (forgets things), mood switches and pain in her body (alot). I love my wife, but sometimes it is hard living with her (you probably know what i mean).
