All hail our Linux-using grandmother overlords
January 30, 2025 6:41 AM   Subscribe

With her British accent, grandmotherly appearance, stately pace and lightly edited videos, Andrea Borman may not seem like the Youtuber type, but that is where she is, and this is there she does. So, where what is the does that she do? Knitting? Baking cookies? Dressing up cats? Nope, with her it's Linux distros and software. Here she discusses why you should ditch Windows (24m) - Is Fedora Linux for new users? (25m) - Comparing Windows Movie Maker with Openshot Video Editor (27m) - How she makes her videos (18m)
posted by JHarris (42 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Having Shepherd remove Microsoft/Windows on my laptop and making it Linux was hands down one of the best decisions. I am only shackled to Windows at the office.
posted by Kitteh at 6:46 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


This is the first time I've heard "Ubuntu" and "Kubuntu" pronounced in a British accent and I'm delighted.
posted by trig at 6:50 AM on January 30 [3 favorites]


Having Shepherd remove Microsoft/Windows on my laptop and making it Linux was hands down one of the best decisions. I am only shackled to Windows at the office.

Can you elaborate on this a little? I don't having coding skills sufficient to manipulate a PC at the OS level, and my previous experiments with Linux (now ~10 years ago) left me thinking 'this is not designed for laypeople'. But I remain unsatisfied w/Windows and would be willing to try again if that has changed.
posted by reedbird_hill at 6:52 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]


I will say (having watched a bit of the "Why you should ditch Windows" video), she's addressing an audience that's already fairly techy, using terms like "Desktop Environment" and "distribution" and names of specific DEs and so on. So if you're watching this without that background and thinking "this is all too techy for me" - it doesn't quite have to be that way, she's just providing a somewhat advanced entry point and seems more interested in trying out lots of options than many people.
posted by trig at 6:55 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


ryanshepard, you don't need any coding skills to run Linux (at least not any more than to run a Mac or Windows OS - knowing about command lines and shell scripts lets you do useful stuff with all of them, but it's not required).

Do you remember what sorts of issues you ran into last time around?
posted by trig at 6:56 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


Is 2025 The Year Of Linux On The Desktop?
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:59 AM on January 30 [15 favorites]


Can you elaborate on this a little? I don't having coding skills sufficient to manipulate a PC at the OS level, and my previous experiments with Linux (now ~10 years ago) left me thinking 'this is not designed for laypeople'. But I remain unsatisfied w/Windows and would be willing to try again if that has changed.

Oh, I don't either! That's why my spouse, who hated the bloat of Windows on his own computer, did it for me when I too began to resent Windows.
posted by Kitteh at 6:59 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


Kitteh can speak for herself of course, but to respond to ryanshepard with my own experience....

Windows is a monolith, but your Linux experience will be greatly influenced by your distribution, each of which are almost like separate OSes. There really is a distro for everyone. Out of the box Arch doesn't even get you networking, it has to be configured yourself. At the other extreme, Ubuntu, and especially Mint do their best to give you a usable system with minimal exposure to the command line. And there's a new generation of distos now like Pop! OS that go even further.

So, just calling it "Linux" doesn't really provide enough information. In particular, there's the division between systems that do releases, which are most of them, which thoroughly test out all their included software but will stick you with the versions of software available at that release, and rolling release distros, which get you new software fairly quickly, but rely a lot more on community packaging and testing.

At the moment I use Manjaro, which is based on Arch but does a lot more towards getting you to an initial usable state, and is a rolling release distro. There are some elements that I wish were better explained (no one told me what an AUR was ahead of time), but it's gone well for me so far.
posted by JHarris at 7:05 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


Windows 11 is a stable, easy-to-use operating system and it runs every program I’m interested in. I’d rather endure its small corporate irritations than Linux’s large technological ones.
posted by Lemkin at 7:29 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


@grumpybear69 Linux on the desktop! Any decade now. I can feel it.

Linux is great, I love Linux, I've been using Ubuntu since they used to post it out on CD. But even the most user friendly distros still require a level of technical knowledge way beyond that required for Windows and Mac. Also Office doesn't run on it (no, LibreOffice isn't anywhere near a replacement for business use) and neither do most games (not natively anyway).
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:33 AM on January 30 [6 favorites]


neither do most games (not natively anyway).

I've been (pleasantly) shocked at just how seamless a lot of Linux gaming is now, especially through Steam. Valve has done a ton of work to make steam deck compatible with Windows games and this largely carries through to regular Linux boxes. With many (most?) games that are theoretically Windows only I can just click install and it... Just works. Including multiplayer!

I know this is leveraging wine and other things under the hood, but if you never have to pop the hood, it's great!

(A lot of games built in common engines like unity/unreal also just release for Linux natively, since modern engines make ports a while lot simpler than they used to be)
posted by Pemdas at 7:56 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


I installed Fedora on my Framework laptop, because at the time that was the distro fully supported by Framework for the particular laptop configuration I got. Plus, I didn’t want to pay for a Windows license.

I started as a beginner Linux user. I know more now, but I am still a novice. I’ve come across the technical terms that Andrea used before, but I still don’t know exactly what a lot of them mean.

I’ve been pretty happy with Fedora. Or happy enough that I haven’t invested the effort for switching. My experience got a lot better once I stopped trying to things the exact same way I’ve done on a Windows or Mac machine. Yes I’ve had to copy code into the terminal on occasion, but that may have been a computer, not operating systems thing. Plus it has made using a computer fun and real again… somewhat analogous to a particular joy now of using physical media instead of digital. It reminds me of my experience leaning Mac/windows in the ‘90’s and early aughts. Lots of novelty… sometimes things are rough around the edges.

Is Fedora for new users coming from Mac/Windows? I think there are other Linux distributions that will have a closer user experience to Windows and/or Mac, but a sufficiently motivated and curious person should give it a go.

Is Linux for new users? IMHO it’s probably not the right fit for folks who need to run Microsoft office suite and/or Adobe Cloud, and no alternative is acceptable. I think many self identified non techy folks may will want/ need help getting a Linux distro of choice installed. I think switching to a suitable Linux distro works better for folks who don’t mind some tinkering, especially if the switch is motivated by ideological reasons.

Would I encourage my non tech savvy relatives to switch from a Mac to Linux? Let’s just say it’s much better for our relationship that their IT troubles can be addressed by the Genius Bar at the Apple Store.
posted by oceano at 8:08 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


I love Linux. My friends make fun of me for it because Linux users tend to "preach" about how good Linux is. I don't often get a chance to preach though! I love that everything can be done from the terminal, the man pages, the open-source, the GUI options that aren't decades of Windows menus stacked on top of each other. And with something like Ubuntu, gaming just works; no driver updates, no fuss, and my PC runs smoother and quieter.
posted by donuy at 8:18 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


ive used headless linux didtros for servers and development for years, but i cant stand it as a daily driver desktop
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 8:20 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]


Linux distro works better for folks who don’t mind some tinkering, especially if the switch is motivated by ideological reasons.

I am motivated by ideological reasons. But past a certain age, the appeal of tinkering drops sharply.
posted by Lemkin at 8:26 AM on January 30 [9 favorites]


even the most user friendly distros still require a level of technical knowledge way beyond that required for Windows

ChromeOS and Android are Linux distributions. Literally billions of people worldwide use Linux as their daily drivers.

The question here has something to do with what a distro means. If it involves installing a different operating system than the default one installed on a computing device you've built or previously purchased, sure, yeah, that involves technical knowledge.

If you're one of the people using a device that uses the Linux kernel by default as shipped, no, that's not a technical issue at all, and it's hard to claim that ChromeOS, Android or other devices (like Amazon's Fire devices or Roku devices using the Linux kernel) are hard to use. Installing a Linux-based OS as a replacement on a machine previously running Windows can be a technical issue, but is now a niche case in the world of computing.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 8:27 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


> All hail our Linux-using grandmother overlords

y'all... Linux is over 30 years old. There are multiple distros over 30 years old. There are people who first got into Linux in college that are now in their 50s.

If Ms. Borman is doing a good and/or entertaining job (same thing, honestly) of introducing people to Linux, that's fabulous and I hope she continues. But the "Surprise! This old person (especially female person) understands technology!" thing is in desperate need of reconsideration.
posted by at by at 8:47 AM on January 30 [18 favorites]


Do you remember what sorts of issues you ran into last time around?

Primary ones were the % of work needing to be done in the command line (or, possibly, my being too clueless to know how to do it otherwise) and lack of plug-and-play compatibility with peripherals, if memory serves.
posted by reedbird_hill at 9:03 AM on January 30


Lemkin > Windows 11 is a stable, easy-to-use operating system and it runs every program I’m interested in. I’d rather endure its small corporate irritations than Linux’s large technological ones.

Once you've become accustomed to how certain of those Windows irritations work and/or managed to get them turned off, I *mostly* agree the user experience is tolerable. Until the next major patch day when Microsoft has a habit of helpfully reverting some or all of your customization.

Or, if you really care about your privacy ... consider Microsoft has at various points asserted that by using Windows, you give them the right to snag (and use for any purpose they desire) any and all data on the machine, or on the network where that machine can see it, or stored on OneDrive or other of their services or ....

Then consider legal or medical professionals having a legally imposed duty to protect confidential client information and if it can be squared with that. If you're a corporate drone, that protection is generally partly someone else's problem, and your org can do the enterprise licensing and even negotiate terms. If you're self-employed or in a really small org, or, or ... then it's your problem. And MS keeps on proving over and over and over and... that they are in no way trustworthy even when slapped by courts. Could keep on ranting and digging citations out, but it has been done to death.
posted by Enturbulated at 9:15 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


even the most user friendly distros still require a level of technical knowledge way beyond that required for Windows

I put Mint on a 2011 HP G6 a few years ago when the kid was doing remote schooling during pandemic lock-downs and there was a lot less getting jerked around than when I had to (Repeatedly) reinstall Windows on my PC after a hard drive issue. Doing partitioning/dual boot stuff, not so much, but just a basic install was hassle-free.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:20 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


at by > Linux is over 30 years old. There are multiple distros over 30 years old. There are people who first got into Linux in college that are now in their 50s.

Mr. Volkerding, the Big Cheese behind Slackware Linux (my preferred distro, as well as the oldest surviving distro) very much resembles that remark. Pretty sure I'm not the only one in thread who also bears at least a slight resemblance as well.
posted by Enturbulated at 9:22 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]


There are people who first got into Linux in college that are now in their 50s.

Not to mention the people who got into Unix way before that...

Glancing through Borman's channel, it looks like she's been posting tech videos on youtube for at least 14 years - mostly about Windows, until she got fed up and switched. (Though there are a few linux videos from the very beginning, and she mentioned in the recent one I watched that she'd tried linux once a long time ago but decided to stick with Windows XP.)


Primary ones were the % of work needing to be done in the command line (or, possibly, my being too clueless to know how to do it otherwise) and lack of plug-and-play compatibility with peripherals, if memory serves.

Yeah, in that case you might have a better experience this time around. Not that things were particularly problematic 10 years ago, at least in my experience, but I feel like these days a lot more of the advice online defaults to GUI based instructions (GUI=graphical user interface, i.e. point-and-click versus typing commands), and hardware compatibility is pretty good. I'd keep 3 things in mind - (1) if you see an answer to a question you have online and the answer is commandline/terminal based, chances are you can keep looking and find a GUI-based answer; (2) the more popular the distro and GUI you use, the more answers you'll get and the higher the likelihood of GUI-based approaches to things* (so for example, you'd want something like Mint with KDE as opposed to Fedora with a tiling window manager); (3) make sure the answers you find online are relatively recent, not from like 10 years ago.

* one exception is Arch Linux, which draws users that want to learn and tinker and has a strong community with tons of good documentation, so if anyone's interested in actually learning to go the commandline route as opposed to the "keep things as familiar as possible" route, that's potentially a good place to start.


I’ve come across the technical terms that Andrea used before, but I still don’t know exactly what a lot of them mean.

I wrote up an explanation of distros, GUIs, desktop environments, and so on here - not sure how clear it came out, but hopefully it's useful to somebody.
posted by trig at 9:34 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


Enturbulated > if you really care about your privacy

(love this “citation style”! will steal)

I think a lot about that tech honcho who first said “privacy is dead; get over it” and how everyone yelled at him for it.

Shooting the messenger, I fear.
posted by Lemkin at 9:41 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


at by, it's not that this is an old person that's using Linux, is that she's vocal about it and spreading the word on Youtube. She bucks the stereotype, and publicly . Of course there's elderly people who use Linux. It's not that she shouldn't use whatever OS she wants, it's that, look! She is! There should be a lot more of her, yet she's the only one I've seen... so far.

Moving on, yep, this thread that was intended to celebrate what she's done and continues to do has been used, once again, as an excuse for people to give their personal takes for why Linux isn't as good as CorporateOS.

Let's trade anecdotes. Lemkin called Windows 11's issues "minor" compared to Linux, when I personally had Explorer freeze hard and have to have an End Task performed on it (if I could even get to Task Manager) for the crime of right clicking on a file, and this persisted on and off for over a year.

I do wonder whether the people who think using a command line is necessary to use Linux have looked at Mint in the past 10-or-so years. It really depends on your use case. I see it as a paradox: Linux is in fact easiest to use for the least computer savvy, because they don't expect nearly as much from their machines. If all you do is browse the web and do some word processing, as basically an information appliance, as ChromeOS and Android demonstrate, it can be useful for that. Windows desktop and Linux desktops are very similar at that level. Then there's a range of experience, which includes installing it on some hardware, where people may or may not encounter issues. But conversely, a lot of people don't feel comfortable installing Windows either.

I think a lot about that tech honcho who first said “privacy is dead; get over it” and how everyone yelled at him for it. Shooting the messenger, I fear.

I think he probably got yelled at for the "get over it" part more than "privacy is dead." Not shooting the messenger, but the gleeful proponent of the status quo.
posted by JHarris at 9:51 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


Linux is in fact easiest to use for the least computer savvy, because they don't expect nearly as much from their machines

Yep. My mom's next computer is going to be Mint on refurbished whatever. She does web/email/YouTube and looks through her digital photo library, so she needs a browser and an image viewer, that's literally it, and honestly I don't need much more than that either.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:01 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


I help people at our local library in Silicon Valley with tech questions. Most of the people I help are over 65 I reckon. I get the occasional Linux question, but most people are Windows and Mac, 50/50. The most common topic is around online finance and associated risks. So such a Youtube channel is not a surprise - good for her!
posted by mdoar at 10:17 AM on January 30


@JHarris: My operating system does not define me. The last time I chatted extensively about my operating system installs, it was March 2008. I have a blog post from back then, if you're interested in what it was like in 2008 to install Ubuntu on your crappy Dell laptop or you're interested in my thoughts on in pubic hairstyles for women over time (link sadly dead) or if you would like to read about the 2008 financial crisis in LOLcats. (I contain multitudes.) Be warned, I swear excessively. I upgraded in 2010 to Lucid Lynx and I noted that at the time. But honestly these days I just don't talk about it. It works and does what I want and I upgrade it sometimes. Meh. Not comment-worthy. I'm 55 in April and female. So, now you know of two (lol) elder women (I only allow the term elder because I get the senior discount without asking these days.) who use linux. Fwiw, I am posting from my antique work computer, a dell optiplex 3020 running Ubuntu 22.04LTS because all I need at work is email and a functional-ish browser and I can't be arsed to update.
posted by which_chick at 10:36 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


I wonder how many people who watch Ms. Borman's channel are older folks... I'm betting most are her grandkids' age. No matter, the more people who are willing to give FOSS a whirl, the better.

I've been happily running Linux at home for about 20 years, currently running Manjaro on one device and Raspbian on another. Hated Arch, debian caused me trouble in many weird places, but I like my two current distros a lot. But I worked in software dev environments for decades, including software testing, so I learned to accept tinkering as a given.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 10:46 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


which_chick, all of these things are great. I'm unsure why you're telling me them, however, unless you also have a popular YouTube channel, which I thought I had been clear that was the subcategory of elderly woman Linux users I was referring to. So, still only one, at the moment.
posted by JHarris at 11:13 AM on January 30


JHarris > this thread that was intended to celebrate what she's done and continues to do has been used, once again, as an excuse for people to give their personal takes for why Linux isn't as good as CorporateOS

All due respect, if you lead off with “Here she discusses why you should ditch Windows ”, it doesn’t seem unreasonable if some people discuss why they choose not to.
posted by Lemkin at 11:43 AM on January 30



If Ms. Borman is doing a good and/or entertaining job (same thing, honestly) of introducing people to Linux, that's fabulous and I hope she continues. But the "Surprise! This old person (especially female person) understands technology!" thing is in desperate need of reconsideration.


And Linux can steer old people's hands away from their mice and trackpads and onto the keyboard.

Definitely a plus for arthritic old hands.
posted by ocschwar at 11:55 AM on January 30


Perhaps? I'll admit to flipping back and forth on that title when I was writing it. So I went back and the video opens with the reasons she switched over, so I went with that name.
posted by JHarris at 11:56 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: My operating system does not define me.
posted by german_bight at 12:05 PM on January 30 [3 favorites]


Is 2025 The Year Of Linux On The Desktop?

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop starts on October 14, 2025 (for computers that don't have a TPM 2.0 chip).
posted by eckeric at 12:35 PM on January 30 [7 favorites]


I upgraded my Linux VM from Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04 recently and encountered an issue where it would just boot into a black, unresponsive screen. To get around this I had to do some keyboard ninjitsu to boot in to "safe mode" and then edit the "grub config" to enable NO SPLASH. Then I was able to see the desktop! Huzzah. But my networking didn't work, so I couldn't install anything using apt. To fix that I had to go and enable eth0 and then restart, but BOOM, black screen again. Why? Because I didn't do grub save or whatever. So more ninja reflexes, save that grub, and boom, I'm finally upgraded to 24.04. And this upgrade was done via Ubuntu's built-in upgrader, BTW.

That's the kind of shenaninganery - and also the lack of the software that I use, like Ableton, Premiere, etc - which keeps me using Windows. Well, that and my memory of being an Amiga user way back in the olden days, and how much easier my life got when I just went with the commodity option.

That said, all of my web development etc. is all headless Linux because it is just so much better and leaner and tweakable.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:48 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


@I EAT TAPAS
Yes I know how prevalent Linux is outside the corporate and home desktop PC and laptop world. However FireTV, Android devices and ChromeOS devices aren't desktop PCs, but desktop PCs are what is under discussion.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:53 PM on January 30


I went the other way, used a Mac since the mid 80's through the good years, the bad years, the resurgence, the various processor transitions... but what really started to grate was the price-tag and stripping away functionality and pushing the store-front + steep price tag... it felt like I was paying more for mediocre hardware (particularly in the late PPC and x86 days)... so I switched my primary couch-surfer to Linux 4-5 years ago and haven't looked back. I mainly live in a web-browser so the OS doesn't matter much, Steam is supported on Ubuntu, so that works nicely... I can use virtualisation if I need to experiment or fire up an alternate OS quickly... VLC lets me control other machines in my network if I need to and I can tinker too (but apart from switching the gui to i3 I don't tinker much at all). Some notable peeves - my kingdom for a file-manager that lets me click to rename instead of popping up a window or dialog... and hardware support can be a nuisance sometimes (everything on my old Elitebook is supported except the webcam which HP seems to have used a weird chip-set for; ah well, I don't speak to anyone anyway...). Best thing, when I buy a new generation of refurbed enterprise laptop, I can just pull the SSD, pop it in the new machine and everything pretty much just works and I can do major OS upgrades in place (no worries about TPM or similar Win 10 to 11 transition junk or having AI shoved down my throat or Siri or Cortana...)
posted by phigmov at 10:16 PM on January 30 [4 favorites]


ChromeOS is a desktop OS. Of rather it's a laptop OS, and in this context that gets sorted into desktop OSes, because what is usually meant by Desktop is not mobile, embedded, server or the like.

An I being pedantic and annoying? Gosh yes. Sorry.
posted by JHarris at 11:02 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]


@grumpybear69

Hah, I had the same problem with VMware and Ubuntu 24.04.

I'm not a power user but any means and have either just used Windows or had a dual boot setup over the last ~15 years. Typically most of the software I need for day to day work is Windows only so that's the go to. I got tired of managing dual boot issues (typically self imposed) and so have a library of VMs that I use for development of specific projects. It's nice to know if I need to go back to some old fpga dev board I have an environment set up for that with all the dependencies.

I've made some variant of Linux my standard environment (usually Ubuntu) at home few times but have always migrated back to Windows for one reason or another over the years. Maybe when I get around to replacing my computer some day I'll throw windows in the vm as well and boot to a Linux distro.
posted by Quack at 10:37 AM on February 1


My own experiences: some years ago I ran Linux as a primary desktop for a few months because it could be loaded directly fro a USB drive and my hard drive had died. It was a lifesaver then, even if it took a bit of time to load software.

It was the business with Copilot, in addition to the right-click hassle I mentioned above, that drove me to try dropping Windows all together. I won't say it's been problem free (it IS a completely other OS after all), but it's been less of one than Windows 11 was.

The hardest part had to do with this graphic tablet I got that only has Windows, Mac, iOS and Android drivers argh. A previous version of its drivers and software had Linux support, but not the most recent and that most recent was all they offered. But worse than that, it demanded a desktop connection to perform an essential first update that made it useful at all.

So I put Windows on a spare laptop just so it could connect and get its initial update completed. That done, I can now connect to it with an Android device, and if I want to use it with a laptop (to get images stored in its built-in memory off of it) I can now connect to it with a Windows 10 VM.

This has been my general experience. Most of the problems with Linux, that I've seen at least, to this day, come from hardware manufacturers being stupid with supporting it, like Broadcom does, who even now makes wireless chips that are a pain to get working under Linux. This doesn't negate anyone else's issues, but I feel like I should mention my own.
posted by JHarris at 4:25 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]


Yeah, fewer software developers and hardware manufacturers supporting it is the main drawback in my experience. Although for hardware, since I've been using linux so long, all the hardware I own except for one very old scanner is stuff I bought after checking for compatibility, so the problem is more one of a smaller selection than one of headaches after buying. (I think Mac users also experience this, to a lesser extent.)

On the other hand occasionally there's an upside: sometimes some peripheral that makes you use the manufacturer's bloated proprietary software to get it to work on Windows will just have basic driver support on linux and let you use it directly or via nice open-source tools that someone developed, without the manufacturer's cruft. That's always satisfying.
posted by trig at 7:19 PM on February 1


Yes, and I've had hardware that Windows has abandoned, or it's impossible to install its drivers, that just works under Linux. I had a USB wifi device once that I was able to get several additional years of use out of because of Linux support.
posted by JHarris at 8:15 PM on February 1


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