I installed Linux on my mother-in-law’s PC to prove it’s easier than Windows

Published Aug 23, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. Everyone says Linux is technically complicated, intended for tech-savvy users who like to dwell in the terminal. However, as someone who has used Linux as my daily driver for 10 years and nudged plenty of friends and family toward it, I can tell you that reputation is a myth—at least on modern Linux desktops. To prove my point, I put my mother-in-law—a completely non-technical user—on Linux. And spoiler alert: it went better than her time on Windows ever did. My mother-in-law is a non-techie And a very proud one at that Credit: Dibakar Ghosh | How-To Geek / ChatGPT My mother-in-law is a self-proclaimed tech illiterate, and a proud one at that. Computers, for her, are a necessary evil of our times—something you can’t escape anymore. She uses one occasionally for e-commerce, social media, checking her email, and opening YouTube to watch videos from my sister-in-law, who's a YouTuber. As simple as this use case is, I've been her on-call tech support ever since I got into a relationship with her daughter. And the problems tend to fall into a few familiar buckets. The big one is her computer randomly restarting. This is primarily a Windows problem—the OS couldn't care less about your autonomy over updates and can decide to restart after installing one. Sure, there's a pop-up warning, but it's trivially easy to miss. It's genuinely a very disruptive practice that even some of my tech-savvy friends find frustrating. The second problem is subtler. When her computer starts slowing down over time, her instinct is to go out and buy a new one. I guess this is partly our fault because we upgrade our phones and laptops so often, citing how much “faster” the new models are. So she concludes that she needs an upgrade, too. But that's often just money wasted, because the machine wasn't slow due to inadequate hardware—it was slow because Windows was being Windows. Some disk cleanup and disabling a few startup applications could likely have fixed it. Granted, it only happened once, but it happened. Then there's the risk of malware exposure. Social media ads can push you to download random stuff, a website might ask you to “install” something as an application, and she also likes playing online poker. If you've ever been to those sites, you know they're a hostile environment full of shady downloads and bad actors. There’s also the fact that she thinks having antivirus software will solve the problem—after all, “the sales rep said so.” Not only is that an unnecessary subscription and more money down the drain, but it adds to making the system feel slower.but it also bogs down system performance even further. But who listens to family when a young man doing a “real job” at the store tells you otherwise? Anyway, the final problem I wanted to add to the list is something that I've faced as her tech support: remote troubleshooting. I always have to physically go over—she lives just a few blocks away—to fix things, because walking a panicked person through opening TeamViewer or RustDesk and reading out a case-sensitive password over the phone doesn't work. She didn’t even notice I replaced Windows with Linux And actually found it less troublesome Recently, she started complaining that her computer had become slow and that she needed a new one. Thankfully, after the fuss we made last time, she consulted us first. I told her I'd make her computer faster and took it home. It's an 8GB RAM machine, so of course Windows 11 crawls on it. And with the current RAM crisis, slapping in another 8GB or buying a new 16GB system would've been ridiculous. Installing Linux was genuinely the most financially responsible option on the table. I didn't want to throw her into an unfamiliar desktop paradigm, so I installed Linux Mint and themed it a little to look closer to Windows 11. She did notice it looked different, but it wasn't a big deal. For her, the OS is basically a bootloader for the browser, and since Linux supports Google Chrome, she didn't have any issues. The old problems mostly evaporated. Linux Mint doesn't force restarts, so nothing interrupts her mid-task. I can just update her system myself whenever I'm over. Malware is also more or less a non-issue for her because Windows malware doesn't run on Linux, and installing system-level software typically requires authentication. I've kept the root password to myself because she doesn't need it. Email spoofing and social engineering are still very real online threats, but they're separate, platform-agnostic problems. So they're not a factor in determining the safety of Windows versus Linux for this particular use case. I also set up her system so I could SSH in if she ran into an issue. This makes troubleshooting so much easier. But thankfully, I haven't had to in the past few months since I switched her to Linux, which tells me the OS is clearly better suited to non-technical users—as counterintuitive as that may sound. Linux is easier—because there are distros designed to be easier Windows, in comparison, is one-size-fits-all Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Leonardo.AI For the longest time, I held the diplomatic position you'll hear from a lot of thoughtful people in computing. It’s the idea that neither Windows nor Linux are inherently harder—they're just different. It's similar to how Japanese speakers might find English difficult—not because it's objectively difficult, but because its grammar is unfamiliar compared with their native language. However, after spending time using both Windows and Linux, I've come to disagree. I now believe that Windows is actually the more difficult operating system, and it essentially boils down to Windows being one-size-fits-all. It's designed for everybody, which means it's really designed for the average Joe. Heavy technical users find it limiting, while non-technical users find it confusing. Linux conveniently sidesteps this entire problem with distributions. On one end, you have distros like Linux Mint, Zorin OS, and elementary OS—fine-tuned for non-technical users like my mother-in-law. In the middle, you have general-purpose distros like Ubuntu and Fedora targeting the typical computer user. And on the “harder” technical end, there's vanilla Arch, Slackware, and Gentoo. Because Linux isn't one thing, it can be molded into whatever shape you actually need, and this flexibility makes it genuinely easier to use than other OSes. With so many distros, there's almost certainly one fine-tuned for you—and something built for you is going to be easier to use than something built for everyone. Linux can be better for non-techies Linux has historically been painted as a technical OS for technical use cases, but the modern Linux desktop is nothing like that. There are desktop environments with polished graphical interfaces, intuitive settings, and clean layouts that are every bit as approachable as any other desktop—arguably more so for non-technical users, precisely because they're minimal and simple. If anything, my mother-in-law is proof.