"Linux too hard for novices" -- myth busted

I've recently installed my distro of choice (Kubuntu) onto the laptops of two novice computer users, one of whom is my roommate. He's a novice to the point of near computer illiteracy, but his needs are also modest. He had a Dell desktop, one of those big screen all-in-one touchscreen units and a Dell laptop. He was getting sick and tired of Windows constantly pestering him for updates and of the antivirus program suddenly running and slowing the computer down.

He started with Kubuntu when he got a very old Windows XP laptop (before his current one) that was as slow as turtles in molasses. It was a laptop from about 2002 whose memory someone had upgraded to 1 GB. Windows was either just screwed up or maybe trashed with viruses, but it was painfully slow. The previous owner gave up on it and just gave it away. I wiped it and installed Kubuntu, which zipped along just fine. When the sound card went bad in that laptop, he bought a more up-to-date laptop with Windows 7 from a pawn shop. 7 was running just fine on this machine, but my novice computer user roommate requested that I put Kubuntu on. He preferred it. He was having no issues figuring out how to do things, granted I needed to help him some to get him going. He does his budget in LibreOffice Calc and organizes logins and links in CherryTree. He also surfs a little on the Internet with Firefox. He puts photos from an SD from his digicam onto his hard drive and e-mails some of them to people. He emails without an email client; he just uses Yahoo. That's it. Not once has he ever complained that he misses Windows. He's glad to be rid of Windows' annoying update system and all the ones from Adobe. It's nice to have it all integrated and speedy.

I also installed Kubuntu on his girlfriend's laptop. Hers was a Windows Vista PC that had been upgraded to 7. She was tired of her computer constantly getting invaded by malware. Her 16 year-old son has a way of finding malware. I set hers up as a dual boot Kubuntu/Win 7 PC because there's some Windows-based game that her son wants to keep playing. In both Kubuntu and 7, her son's login is set to not allow him to install any software.

On both laptops I replaced the Windows 7 or Vista sticker on the front with a little Kubuntu one. Then on the back of the monitor, I stuck a bigger Kubuntu one. In Internet cafes you always know who's using a Mac from that big Apple logo. It's about time to proudly display a Linux logo.

Kubuntu's been a great distro for me, a power user, but it's also worked out well for these novices. That's why I was annoyed when I read someone's blog about Microsoft's discontinuation of support for Windows XP. He claimed that going to Linux would be a bad choice for a novice. That's an absurdly false claim. Although, I've gone with Kubuntu, there are many other distros that are just as user friendly. I previously used regular Ubuntu, but switched when I didn't care for the new Unity interface. I've also tried Lubuntu on a low-powered PC and Puppy Linux. I use Puppy and Knoppix on a bootable thumb drive. These are all distros that I could use just fine if I wanted to. However, if I didn't use Kubuntu, I would probably use Mint with KDE.

I don't miss Microsoft Office AT ALL. Microsoft ruined that suite in 2007 with their ribbon garbage. I kept using Office XP for a while until I got tired of it and switched to LibreOffice. I also have SoftMaker Office, which I use occasionally for writing in German. It has a few German-language features that LO Writer doesn't. I do still use Quicken under Windows 7 via VirtualBox, but plan to switch to KMyMoney soon. Whenever I have to run Windows, I'm annoyed by how cumbersome its never-ending updates are and how I've got to wait for the antivirus defs to update, and then Quicken takes a long time to save files. It will be good to transition to KMyMoney.

Those are my ramblings for those of you technerdy enough to listen. I'm sure many of you have similar stories.

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