XP-Replacement for Parents

[Smylers]

Alex Balhatchet writes:

> > • Ubuntu:  The OS will install, but I don't know if Mum's scanner
> >   will work with it, and I'm pretty sure it won't work in the same
> >   way, where pressing a physical button on the scanner causes some
> >   HP application to open on the desktop with the scanned document.
> 
> This may work quite well. I've had good experience with the mixture of
> HP hardware and Ubuntu. The "HP Toolbox"[0] is ugly but functional.
> 
> Trying it out now it looks like when I go to the HP Toolbox and click
> "Scan" on $work's[1] HP OfficeJet Pro L7700 does just open the Simple
> Scan application.

That's good to know. Unless I find out that Mum uses a bunch of other
non-web-based applications, Linux is sounding more possible than I first
thought.

> On another topic if you want something that looks like Windows XP but
> acts like Ubuntu I've read good things about Lubuntu[2].

I've been using Lubuntu for a couple of years. Not because I want
something that looks like XP (which would be a strange fetish for
somebody who's never used XP), but because I want to have all of my
desktop pixels available for applications, and standard Ubuntu
introduced the Unity environment with an enforced menu bar across the
top of the screen.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend Lubuntu to a non-techie. There's a few
places where it just isn't quite polished or integrated enough. I find
some of the lightweight alternatives to common Linux applications are
too lightweight, missing useful features. So I run a mixture of those
and traditional Ubuntu apps, but it can be awkward to find the right
configuration doohickey to make the latter always run in place of
Lubuntu's default ones. And some of programs seem to be expecting
Unity and don't quite work well in LXDE.

I'm happy enough with Lubuntu for me for the time being, but I will look
around the next time I'm upgrading, and perhaps give something else a
go.

> [1] Not to be parsed as $work::s

As it happens, it was actually your footnote signifier which I somehow
managed to mis-parsed, initially thinking [1] was a subscript and
wondering how many elements your @work array currently has!

Smylers
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