Part 1

Five months ago I set up a laptop for someone who is pretty technologically illiterate. They’re not able to type, don’t have a good sense of online security, and the only computer they had used before was a chromebook.

I’m glad to say that the five months went without a hitch and that the person I gave the computer to was able to use flawlessly. Their daily computing activities looked something like this:

• Practicing typing
• Using google suite of office tools to create stuff
• Watching youtube videos at 1080p

All in all things that are pretty light on the computer.

Maintenance on my end

The entire experience required very little maintenance on my end. After the initial setup it went off without a hitch. Linux Mint is really stable and it is setup in a really nice way out of the box. It is familar to people who have used chromeos or windows and it turns xfce which has a pretty ugly out of box experience into a pretty nice looking de.

I was actually pretty surprised when I found out I didn’t have to mess around with the wifi driver at all within the 5 months. When I used the machine before, I had gotten pretty used to having a wifi related issue happen at some point every once in a while due to the driver.

One thing which I did have to step in to do was to do a system upgrade of linux mint. When mint 24 released, I had to step in and upgrade the system on my own since it was too hard for the person. This may make linux mint a dealbreaker for those who considered it. If you are looking for an operating system you can completely leave alone after giving to a computer and not have to come over and fix, this may not work out pretty well.

The other things which happened were not the fault of mint but rather of the state I left the browser in. I installed chromium as the default browser and after changing the search engine, I pretty left it as it was. This ended up being a mistake as the person somehow managed to install a malicious chrome extension through a malware ad. To fix this, I installed ublock origin to block the ads and remove any opportunity of this happening. I also tried my best to teach them about internet security. After that incident, nothing happened much.

Conclusion

I can say that this was a success and I’m glad that it worked out as well as it did. They have a computer which has served and will continue to serve them well for their daily tasks and I’m glad I was able to help them.