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On Sun, 1 May 2011, Neil Winchurst wrote:
And, by the way, with reference to Gordon's grandfather who is 74 and cannot take to Linux, well I am 78 and managing fine thanks.
I'm glad you're getting on with it, but when did you start? (and why?)However, it was my father in-law, not Grandfather. My Grandfather, had he still been alive would have embraced Linux with open arms.
FiL chose the path of least resistance, having been using Win since the year dot and been brainwashed into it in the corp-rat/government land he worked in until retirement. It was what he was used to. I ended up spending a whole day with him going through Win7 and trying to make it work for him. I tried to get him interested in Linux - I told him it was free, told him that OpenOffice was free (He was already using it on his old XP box!), but he still wasn't interested. I installed FireFox for him, with Adblock & flash block - but when my back was turned, he installed Chrome - as that had been faster on his old XP box (His new Win7 PC is a quad core intel i7 box! It's not slow, and FF4 flies under Win!)
Some people are like that.Unlike my wife, my FiL doesn't actually need any Win specific bit of software at all - all he does is some letter writing/printing, email, web browsing and the ability to arrange and store (and backup) images from his digital camera. I know that all those are very well supported under the various Linux distros, but he didn't want change.
The question I asked him was along the lines of "Are you prepared to learn a slightly different way of doing things?" The answer wasn't positive, and I suspect it's a family trait.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq