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A comment on A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards. Parent comment

Re:A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards by kashyapc on Sunday July 22, 2018 @05:23PM (#17589001)
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. :-(

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Re:A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards by ImaCake on Monday July 23, 2018 @04:23AM (#17591311)
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.
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Re:A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards by kashyapc on Monday July 23, 2018 @08:54AM (#17592369)
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!

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Re:A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards by severine on Sunday July 22, 2018 @06:07PM (#17589171)
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?
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Re:A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards by kashyapc on Monday July 23, 2018 @01:39AM (#17590784)
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.

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