Ubuntu: I wonder if we’ve all done the Mother test
I was reading an old entry by Ivanka Majic about testing Ubuntu on hey mother now that she got a job with Canonical.
I remember testing Ubuntu on my dear ol’ mum, and a part from other people messing the computer up and my sisters having extreme reluctance to anything other than windows, she was very impressed and decided to spread the word herself to all her friends. The fact that she didn’t have a computer at all before was a great starting point, nothing to unlearn and lots of new stuff to explore.
OK so I wonder if other Canonical staffers and Ubuntu members have tested Ubuntu on their mothers, I’m sure we’ve all done it right?
2009-06-17 at 09:39
I did this test, and it didnt last a week. Problems for them: Scanner no longer worked properly, games like age of empires not quite right graphically, and the audio editing software asked to set up JACK with many arcane settings.
Word documents got slightly mangled, and the 2d graphics performance was aweful – BBC iplayer had worse performance in ubuntu than windows
However, my youngest brother liked the gcompiz suite and the penguin racer game, as well as the tuxpaint software. The generally good speed (compared to a bloated, older win2000 installation) impressed them, and the way all the software came free impressed them.
So, with time, I may try again. Positive steps are happening with all the problems I listed (apart from JACK?), but when I tried, ubuntu just didn’t cut it.
2009-06-17 at 09:50
I’m confused, did you do this for your mum? I can’t be sure. And most importantly of all, did you report each of the issues you found as bugs in launchpad?
Can’t fix what you don’t report, what what.
2009-06-17 at 23:05
A much more sustainable approach would be to help her report them herself – that gets the Ubuntu community an even more engaged user, and goes a lot further towards fixing bug #1 than just filing them yourself
-Leigh
2009-06-17 at 09:48
A female friend – almost 50 mentioned that she would either scrap or hand in for service – a 3 year old laptop with ok specs. Reason: Bricked by XP.
I asked her to download Kubuntu 9.04 liveISO and boot from it just to establish working hardware. Next time i spoke to her, she had Kubuntu 9.04 installed – and all she needed was a little guidance to get the broadcom wifi up and running. She has never used anything but Windows (XP was the latest). She never had installed any OS before (not Windows either).
The laptop made her 7 year old happi happi happiiii – and the mom was glad too – when se found all the edu-packages and games.
The mom wantet to swap on her own laptop too, but I asked her to wait until she got really comfortable with Kubuntu.
Haven’t heard a word about the machine since – apart from a confirmation that there was no problems whatsoever.
I have not received a single question or request for help. Not one single request. It just works.
2009-06-17 at 10:03
I have done that at a neighboor’s place. Old machine, very slow with Windows. They asked if I could reinstal Windows. I asked what apps they were running (web, mail, MSN, BitTorrent)… I said “Try Ubuntu”… “What?” So i installed it.
They loved it. When the laptop’s Windows went messed up… they asked me to put Ubuntu on the laptop too.
Gilles.
2009-06-17 at 10:15
I agree that the Mom test is an important test, but for many it is too easy a test. Moving to Ubuntu was easy for my mom because her expectations are very low. She needs to write some emails, use the web for online banking, play some solitaire, and print documents every once in a while. (Note, this is not restricted to my Mom, my Dad would likely also be fine with Ubuntu. Obviously many Mom’s and Dad’s may be locked into Windows software because of their work).
Because of the ease of this test for many, I think that the new test needs to be a younger sibling, nephew, niece, or young cousin. In my experience, these are the people who often want a computer that is really easy to use while still wanting to do advanced tasks such as:
* Voice and Video Chatting
* Minor Photo and Video editing
* Watching High-Res flash videos online (hulu, etc)
* Extensive document creation for their school work ( Many Mom’s do this too!)
* Music device syncing (iPod’s mostly)
* Gaming
2009-06-17 at 10:20
My mother (60+) has been using it for a year or so now. The only thing she’s not keen on is f-spot, I’m kinda with her on that.
2009-06-17 at 10:26
Ubuntu was my grandmother’s first desktop OS..
..but now I’ve got her on Mac OS 10.4.11– the eMac I got for her was less intimidating, hardware wise, than the ugly eMachines was, and it seems that OS X is still the best OS for it, although I hope this changes in the near future with Free alternatives to Google Earth, Skype, and Flash..
My mom relies on Ubuntu every day, we bought her an Inspiron 1525n from Dell. She does fine.
2009-06-17 at 12:47
Installed Ubuntu on my mom’s laptop, and now have to deal with semi-regular calls (every few weeks) about:
- screen stays black instead of waking up after reopening lid (she doesn’t have the press-power-for-4-seconds trick internalized yet)
- laptop doesn’t go to sleep when closing lid for second time (looks like some ACPI regression that crept in with some SRU)
- Wifi doesn’t connect sometimes (but she has already learned that rebooting usually helps)
- Firefox “suddenly disappearing” (crashing due to broken Java applet)
And I have to copy her photos into F-Spot, because that only happens every few months and is a bit counterintuitive.
Those problems will probably have to stay until maybe a new release fixes that (the current installation is a bit older but getting Jaunty working nicely takes some time). And I can’t really say “Hi mom, I’m here to visit you, but actually now I need to spend some hours to debug your laptop”
Well… I can’t really say how it would be with Windows XP or Vista – maybe it would be similarly difficult, with problems cropping up at other places. At least she doesn’t have to care about malware now; and also the basic tasks (browser and mail and everything related) work fine. But all in all it’s not as smooth as I’d like it. Maybe if I have some more money, I can get her a Mac and buy myself free from sysadmin duty
2009-06-17 at 15:39
Want to know what you do with a broken Mac? Buy a new Mac. Seriously, sysadmin problems disappear only in the time sense, not really in the money sense.
2009-06-17 at 15:13
It’s not just my mother but also my sister (24) and my brother (32)
My sister is least tolerant but they all seem absolutely fine with the change and I would be told if they weren’t
Objection from my sister: “Why would it ask me to accept something I don’t understand?”
My mother keeps little notes of questions but at least I am not constantly removing rubbish like I had to on her windows machine.
2009-06-17 at 20:34
There’s at least 139 of us:
https://launchpad.net/~my-mom-runs-ubuntu
2009-06-17 at 20:34
Uh, sorry, 189
2009-06-17 at 23:04
I do wish we’d call it something other than the “Mom test”. It’s not really fair to the dads who are learning Ubuntu, or the mums who already know it.
In that spirit, I made a new launchpad group:
https://launchpad.net/~my-dad-runs-ubuntu
Join it if you dare get your dad to take the Dad Test – it can be just as challenging
-Leigh
2009-06-18 at 03:20
I was asked by my Dad to get my mum a laptop for her 60th. They wanted a big screen to look at photos on (I recently installed Picasa on their Windows desktop and my mum actually said it had “revolutionized her life”!)
I was really doubtful about “forcing” Ubuntu on her to satisfy me – I had to be sure I could honestly say it would work for her and not just be a sop for my idealism or “for her own good”, because that’s a quick way to alienate people.
Luckily 9.04 worked well with all the hardware (Intel-based) so a big hurdle is solved right away. I can also say that I spent *hours* setting up the “pre-installed” Vista, and minutes installing Ubuntu. Why laptop makers need their own cruddy update program to update all their crapware on top of the 500MB of Vista updates god knows. Some of the driver installs it wanted to do were *hard* to get right, and I’m a techy! Also, Vista takes about 2 minutes to boot although Aero is smooth once it gets going.
Installing Ubuntu by comparison is so easy… dear God, there’s no comparison! And it’s fast…
So now she has a machine with lots of nice software (OOo, Abiword, Inkscape, Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Pidgin, Picasa…) all ready to go. A lot of the software is already familiar to her from her XP machine. She really finds the computer hard, so I honestly believe she’ll find Ubuntu easier than Vista.
I asked her and she told me she’s used it a couple of times to look at pictures. She didn’t even phone me up for help! Good start. The only downside was my 13yo nephew who exclaimed in disgust “everything is in funny places on this computer” and went back to the XP machine. I agree with a comment I saw that a nephew/niece/cousin test would be important too – they are more demanding users.
My next challenge will be to get my “can’t even turn the PC on” Dad to have a go…
2009-06-20 at 09:30
There’s an upside to the 13-y-o nephew screaming and running from it – it means he doesn’t monopolize her machine
2009-06-18 at 08:09
My mom rocks at the Linux department : http://www.svaksha.com/post/2007/mom-rocks