Seems like we're in the same spot with our moms. I'm eyeballing Opensuse Kalpa for her, but I'm personally not comfortable enough with MicroOS to be her support channel. But I'm evaluating Kalpa slowly and trying to learn. It has potential.
What you have for the OS for your mom currently? Yeah, I think I'm sticking with kubuntu LTS for the foreseeable future for mine. I'll upgrade her to 24.04 and hoping KDE 6 lands in the backports soon after.
@@LowTechLinux She's currently on Windows 10, but it's starting to feel real sluggish on her laptop. I want something that's as low maintenance as possible for her, hence Kalpa that's supposed to update 100% automatically and all that (which I'm not sure my test rig does btw...). Any specific reason you're going with KDE over Gnome for your mom?
It's just easier. I can more easily make shortcuts on the desktop for browser, and browser link to email (desktop icon for mail that opens chrome to mail.google.com), kpatience, which she really likes, etc. then I say just click this icon and you get what you want. Gnome makes that shit hard and extensions break with updates sometimes. I'd rather avoid that extra cruft and just give her something that always works. That and I don't care for gnome myself, KDE plasma is lighter and easier on the equipment. With LTS the updates are few and far between and I just update when I'm over there so she doesn't have to worry about it.
@@LowTechLinux I agree with those points on Gnome vs KDE. I'm a KDE guy myself but I was thinking maybe Gnome could be for my mom, given all the talk about Gnome being user friendly. Well, I found Gnome so wonky that it was very difficult to use, and I think she'll feel the same. It breaks so many old UI traditions, and she's been using computers since the 90's so I think she might get confused by how different it is. Plus, I found Gnome to be laggy as hell on my test rig with the same low amount of RAM as my moms computer has. KDE ran way better. Doing the updates for her is a good idea. At least if they are few and far between.
I'm not sure, but I think that when you press update all the sources tries to give you a sudo prompt at once and only one can succede. Wonder if the first one is Zypper stuff, then Flatpak. Flatpak might be one for programs and one for the Flatpak platform. Other than not needing password for updates, maybe passwords for installing new apps, I don't know how it will be resolved. I don't know how other distros makes this work.
