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Downsides of Linux (mint) as the os on a web browsing pc

Monkeypeas
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Hi there, just a quick question, i'm planning on swapping out the internals of my fathers desktop from a aging C2D based system to a low power 1155 celeron since i have the parts laying about, it should make for a much faster system that uses probably half the power, its about time i think, that c2d bothers me xD

 

Is it worth me installing windows 7/8/10 on it if all he does is web browse and play the occasional browser flash game?, thats literally all he does, a 64gb ssd is the only storage in the machine, and he doesnt even need most of that, the machine is ONLY used for web browsing, so i was considering just throwing linux mint on there and using that as i know its fairly windowsy looking so it would be familiar.

 

what, if any are the potential downsides of this over me re-installing a windows os?, like i said, its ONLY used for web browsing.

 

any thoughts or tips would be helpful, i plan on installing mint on one of my own machines to fiddle around with it first either way, i just wanted to know if anyone has decided that a linux based os is a good choice for a web browsing pc, or has installed it for there own, less than tech savy parents, and with how much success.

 

thanks, peas~

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Mint should be perfectly fine, as there would be little to no difference in web browsing. However, if your father is very used to using Windows, it may be better to leave him with that.

Thy hath sinneth, and in thy life thou hast fallen to an unholy, unspeakable level of humanity. Thou hast given into your basest needs. And suffered many years under thine Satan-box. However, if thine be willing, as thy hast show yourself to be, thy can ascendeth into thy glorious fold of the glorious church. Go well, my brother, may your temps be low and your frames high. ~ MrDynamicMan

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1 minute ago, UL_42L said:

Mint should be perfectly fine, as there would be little to no difference in web browsing. However, if your father is very used to using Windows, it may be better to leave him with that.

i doubt he'd care, aslong as he can turn it on and open a chrome or firefox browser window, the os's layout doesnt really make a difference, it makes me wonder why i bothered with windows on it in the first place

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Just now, Monkeypeas said:

i doubt he'd care, aslong as he can turn it on and open a chrome or firefox browser window, the os's layout doesnt really make a difference, it makes me wonder why i bothered with windows on it in the first place

In that case, go ahead. There shouldn't be any downsides.

Thy hath sinneth, and in thy life thou hast fallen to an unholy, unspeakable level of humanity. Thou hast given into your basest needs. And suffered many years under thine Satan-box. However, if thine be willing, as thy hast show yourself to be, thy can ascendeth into thy glorious fold of the glorious church. Go well, my brother, may your temps be low and your frames high. ~ MrDynamicMan

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If you are concerned about his common sense (clicking bad links, getting viruses, etc.) Linux would be a good upgrade, but I have to warn you Flash is much better supported with new versions, and higher performance on Windows.

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For simply web browsing, Linux is great. The only small problem might be any Flash videos he comes across, which are being phased out anyway, and I believe Mint has Flash pre-installed anyway. So Mint is a great option for him imo.

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chromium browser has flash built in. I believe I read somewhere that google is planning on dropping flash support with will either force everyone to stop using such a bug ridden sack of rubbish whoms main advantage is ti attackers or people will stop using chrome.

 

personally I hope its the first as flash really is the worse thing to have installed on any machine windows or not. People find exploits for flash faster than adobe at patch it.

 

installing chromium should be a simple sudo apt-get install chromium-browser in terminal.

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42 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

chromium browser has flash built in. I believe I read somewhere that google is planning on dropping flash support with will either force everyone to stop using such a bug ridden sack of rubbish whoms main advantage is ti attackers or people will stop using chrome.

 

personally I hope its the first as flash really is the worse thing to have installed on any machine windows or not. People find exploits for flash faster than adobe at patch it.

 

installing chromium should be a simple sudo apt-get install chromium-browser in terminal.

 

Chromium does not have support build in for npapi plugins anymore since version 46 or so as far as i know.

So his best bett would be either Firefox or something like Midory.

But it looks like that more browsers will be phasing out certain npapi plugins over time.

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To reiterate and elaborate on my previous post, I would recommend Linux, except for if Flash is a big deal for you.  Why?  Several reasons:

  • Officially, Adobe is no longer making new versions of Flash for Linux.  There are ways to use the last one they released, and iirc there are also ways to run the latest Windows version using something like Wine, but know that whatever it is, there will be a bit of a procedure to it.
  • Flash performance on non-Windows OSes has been (and as far as I know is still) poor.  Flash was never particularly efficient to begin with, but I noticed in doing my own tests that the native Linux flash player was equivalent in performance to running the Windows player in Wine.  If you want to do intense things, and/or have modest hardware, and/or care about heat produced or battery life, this could be a concern for you.

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16 hours ago, Monkeypeas said:

snip

Just to throw my two cents in, I made the move from Windows 7 to Linux Mint myself a little over a month ago and I have really enjoyed it. Mint is probably the best Linux distro for a Windows user and the only issue I have come across thus far is compatibility issues with my Steam collection.

 

I used this video when I did my install. It helped. Might be worth a look. I dunno.

 

Best of luck!

 

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Mint should be fine.  You could probably pick something lighter, though, and have a snappier computer--Mint isn't the lightest of distros, though like almost all Linux distros it is still great even on old hardware.  Lubuntu might be a good bet, since it's specifically geared to be lightweight, or Debian's LXDE or XFCE editions--Debian is usually harder to use for the non-Linux-savvy as a day-to-day, general-purpose OS, but for just web browsing it's pretty much ready to go right out of the box, no real changes needed.  Debian is probably comparable to Lubuntu as far as system resource use goes.  Mint should be a perfectly fine choice, though--it just has a lot of extra stuff it comes with that might not be needed and may (or may not) slow down the system a little bit.  Something more lightweight would cut down a lot on system resource use, and leave more CPU/RAM available for the web browser.

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Linux should be better option here. Little to no chance to get viruses from sites. 

And please do not use flash player. It's bad for any system be it linux, mac or windows.

Computer users fall into two groups:
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

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