The other week my Dutch language teacher (he's ~55) wrote an email "I would like to try Linux, can you please assist?" after learning about what is open source and libre software. I was pleasantly surprised to receive his email. So last week I went to install Fedora 28 on his new laptop. It all went smoothly. No, that's a lie; I had to do a little scary command-line surgery while he watched me do it (and heard me assure he doesn't need to do anything like that).

I set up all the requisite things, and since it was his first time, we went through a few common desktop workflows tailored to his needs. There I noticed: he was single-clicking where he needed to double-click—e.g. while opening a directory. I briefly explained the differences between the two and we tried again. He got better, but still struggled. I biked back home wondering if he'll continue to struggle with the double-click. :-(

Maybe Ubuntu would be more appropiate as a first time distro? I use Ubuntu because I end up frustrated having to google a million issues whenever I use any other linux distro. I grew up on windows desktop and can't really see any but the most determined ipad user from sticking with ubuntu let alone anything else.

I considered it, but Fedora is the beast I know for ~10 years, and I could debug it more confidently if something breaks (and I know I'll inevitably be called for tech support). Also, I've had "great success" with Fedora on my Father's (age: 67) desktop for already 3+ years; so I "built on top of that".

My professor's use cases are quite simple: writing articles in Libre Office (he's already familiar with it on Winblows), YouTube, and a browser—only one tab at a time; he was blissfully unaware of the concept of tabs until we walked through it!

I changed to single-click (and select-on-hover) a few months after moving to Linux, and won't come back, maybe your prof would like it too?

Hmm, I didn't consider that. I'll write to him to ask how it's going, and will suggest if he would like to try this.

Thanks for the idea.

> And the inconsistency between when they should single-click and when they should double-click causes a lot of confusion.

There's a lot of anecdotes about how uneasy/annoyed/bothered it can make you feel when watching someone unfamiliar with a scroll wheel instead mouse over and slowly click+drag the scrollbar, but the big one for me is seeing someone double-click on a hyperlink...

In my experience, dragging the scrollbar slowly hasn't been an issue I've seen. What I have seen people do is drag the scrollbar really quickly and end up at the bottom of the page, when what they want is in the middle. They correct this by dragging the scrollbar sharply up, but they're now back at the top of the page. Rince, repeat.

I also see people use the arrow buttons on the scrollbar. But they just click the button repeatedly instead of holding it down. Which means that for a very long page, it can take them a long time and hundreds of clicks to get to the section of the page they want to see.