Migrating Parents to Linux

Since Windows 10 support ended October this year, and I don't hate my mum enough to upgrade her to Windows 11, I decided that the best course of action was to switch her to Linux once again. We tried this before, but it failed due to lacking office software. Since my mums workplace switched to Office365, we won't have this problem anymore.

Distro Selection

I heard a lot of good stuff from Bazzite, but my mum is not a gamer, and I wanted to give her a more stable and mature distro+desktop environment. In the end I settled for Fedora with KDE Plasma. I hope that this choice works out well.

Installation

Before wiping windows off of my mums laptop, we needed to make sure there was no data loss. Luckily, my mum did not use many apps. The most important things to check / back-up were:

• Browser stuff (bookmarks and password)
  • these can be exported easily from firefox, thank god
• e-mail client stuff
  • She used webmail, but make sure to check all e-mail clients yourself, you never know what you might find
• OneDrive stuff
  • Almost unused
• Documents and Pictures
  • My mum had a proper maze of folders, files and links. Her main picture folder ended up being "Photos/Photos/My Photos/Photos", which was fun to figure out

Post-Installation

All I had to add to a vanilla Fedora install was:

• Enable flathub sources in the package manager
• Install Signal
• Install VLC Player
• Install and set-up a Nextcloud client
• Install the best screenshot tool flameshot (through dnf)

I also set my mum up with BitWarden, let's see how this experiment goes.

On a side-note: It was really refreshing to see that I could plug in a wireless mouse and use it immediately, without windows needing to download and install a driver first. Windows is truly a shit operating system...

Updates:

• 2026-01-11: Sometimes linux gets the microphone levels drastically wrong, but I managed to talk my mum through adjusting her mic levels down to ~15% to make it an enjoyable experience. This is probably something that I should have checked myself post-installation.