Met a nice lady at the grocery store

I don’t have any reason to not trust OP, but the likelihood of this conversation happening at ALL seems incredibly unlikely. Never mind that it is described as successful.

If true, this is amazing.

I don’t get why she would take her mouse to the grocery store rather than just ask her son, who installed it for her. All I could guess would be, her old mouse didn’t work so she went out and bought one?
- I'm assuming OP meant a store like Target or Walmart that have groceries and also a tech section
- All the grocery stores around where I live sell pretty much everything; electronics, car accessories, hardware like lights, screwdrivers, pliers etc. And yes, also fruits, vegetables, meats, deli, etc.
I literally set up Ubuntu for my mother (an old lady by now) 10+ years ago, and she has absolutely no problems with it other than the occasional LTS version updates that I need to do for her. I am pretty sure the overall tech-support I had to do for her over all these years is actually lower as it is much more difficult to accidentally mess up a desktop Linux than some Windows installation.
I live a few hours away from her and can't just go out and buy her a new mouse (and she doesn't like online shopping), so the OP story could be exactly her to the letter (except she isn't using Linux Mint).
- I literally set up Ubuntu for my mother...
  I've never seen someone so brazenly bragging about elder abuse before.
- I installed Fedora on my aunt's laptop she runs an eBay business with. She only ever used Excel for a spreadsheet she tracks her accounts with and Chrome for her listings. Replaced them with Libre office calc and Chromium, didn't really need to explain anything to her
- Yeah, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just incredibly unlikely.
  The number of people out there that fit the description of your mother is low.
  The number of people that could have intelligently answered the question is a bit higher, but still low.
  The likelihood of those 2 people meeting in a store not dedicated to computer tech, and having this exact conversation, is like… monkeys playing Mozart level unlikely. ;)
I mean, it could be possible that the box of the mouse said something like kernel 2.6+. Considering that is older than 2011, OP's answer was absolutely spot on.
Why is this sweet old lady carrying a mouse around the grocery store asking about decades old kernel versions lol
- Put this way... 😂

Old lady uses Linux … what’s your excuse?

My father, who taught computer science for the US Army, later became a government contractor, and for whom Unix systems were bread and butter, is now retired and farts around on a Mac reading political blogspam all day.
My mother, having never had any interest or real education in computing in her entire life, now uses Linux Mint to take care of important shit and keep the family organized.
muh vibeo ganes
- With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).
  Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)
- Do most newer fighting games work on Linux? I usually play multiplayer games and the anti cheats usually don't work on Linux, but I'm not sure how modern fighting games are set up.
I'm not senile
I'm not a nerd.
- Takes one to know one.
  Here is your bootable USB-Stick.

Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers.

Next on things that totally happened today...

Before I decide whether this story is real I need to know what OP looks like that some lady singled him out in public to ask a Linux related question. OP, do you wear a wizard hat in public? Were you buying Doritos and Mountain Dew? I must know.

A robe and wizard hat.
I imagine OP had a neckbeard, belt and suspenders and was carrying a copy of Gödel-Escher-Bach.

i worked in sales long enough to know that No, No sweet older lady ever spoke those words to you "setup on linux mint" and include the capacity for understanding hardware compliances? did everyone in the store clap too? but...it would be a nice fantasy ngl

With what I've been through, I'm beginning to wonder if OP is telling the truth 😂
About 7 years ago I got a call from some random lady in her 70s. Turns out her husband passed away not long ago and every computer in the house had Linux Mint installed. She needed someone to help her with some various simple techy things that her husband used to handle.
I couldn't help but wonder how this random lady got my phone number. Turns out that one day, my Grandfather went on a walk down the road and this lady was outside tending to her garden. I have no clue how the conversation shifted to the topic of Linux, but it did. And my Grandpa knew I was in college for Computer Science, so he just volunteered me for this task.
Fast forward to today and I still help her out once or twice a year with whatever random questions pop up.
Uh my grandparents have Linux on their machine (set up a decade or more ago after I got sick of cleaning out malware/incredimail installs). They know enough to ask if stuff works on Linux though might not know to ask about Mint/Ubuntu specifically.
TBF they usually ask me first but they'll also ask the salesperson.
Do you find it impossible for an older lady to have the capacity to understand hardware compliances or use Linux?
Some sweet older ladies used to work for the NSA like my grandma, and she only had me get rid of her Linux mint partition because she wasn't using it much
Keep in mind that an older lady to OP might not be that old...

I did once have a very not technical mate ask for some help with their laptop, and it was randomly running edubuntu? I was like yeah no worries I got this but why TF are you running linux, they didn't even really understand, apparently some random friend had set them up with it because they didn't want to pay for windows lol.

edubuntu
An education focused Ubuntu distro, weird. Also getting into Linux because it's free is a great reason to get into Linux, if you get comfortable with it now it can help you in many STEM careers in addition to your own needs and proposes.
- Presumably the friend was familiar with it and didn't want to recommend something they didn't know.

Based boomer ladies embracing open source software.

I tried to install Linux on my mom's laptop for her, it was too scary. So she is still using windows 7 and probably getting scammed left and right.
- My dad is running xubuntu for about 6 years now. I didn't get any questions in the last 2 years. Besides for installing a new printer.
  Before that it was mostly which program he needed for something. Never a black screen anymore, malware or anything like that.
- My mom on the other hand did not find it problematic , given that she never used computers before and her first exp was linux mint 😌
- Back in 2010 or so I got sick of my mother constantly getting viruses, Trojans and spyware and installed Linux on her laptop. It actually worked out great… support calls went from once a month to her just wondering how to get the photos from her camera periodically. After a few years she got a Chromebook, which surprisingly has been more annoying. My dad somehow thought she needed 6 Google accounts or something and she’s constantly confused about which one she’s signed into. Other than that, both are a whole lot easier to deal with for both of us than her having windows.
- Zorin looks easier for the unacquainted.
  https://zorin.com/os/
They'll probably enjoy Linux way more than windows. It's so much less intrusive.
- Yeah plus after two hours googling how to make something work, and then another two hours googling why the solution failed they can get used to getting off the PC and internalizing the concept of 'life's too short'.

Have an elderly patron at the cafe that I volunteer at as a tech support (basically helping the old sods learn how to use their phones and connect to the new digital services from the government in Denmark) and he is a Linux user too. Dude is 79 and is the fella I go to if I have any linux questions. Think he uses an old IBM ThinkPad and practically consoles everything except his web use. I want to stay as pro as him when I turn 79!

If the website doesn't work in lynx, it's not worth visiting
- Man, I tried that approach on a MacOS terminal and it's confusing as heck. Great for slacking off at work pretending to still be working, though. Someone once made a terminal app for browsing Reddit, maybe they can for Lemmy too? :D
- Hi Richard!
My computer science teachers were all over 70 and *nix users, that's the generation that created a lot of computer stuff we use to this day.

I saw Richard Stallman at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter. When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

All I can I say to that is: what???
- its a dumb copypaste bullshit
- There's been a rash of these celebrity Milky Way encounters over the last few years… just check the internet.
- Huh?

That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone's time with this kind of question. Plus: "we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!"

Doesn't need Linus for that, the average Arch user should be enough
That doesn't sound like Torvalds at all. The guy doesn't suffer fools, but he doesn't just pop off at people randomly. All accounts are that he's a pretty chill dude.
That really does not sound like Linus to me. The guy can be quite blunt and will gladly reach for swear words in his e-mails. But he can just as well be accommodating. I imagine, he'd be delighted that an old lady is running his software.

This is both very likely true while also being the peak male Lemmy user fantasy that will confuse future alien archaeologists the most. Thanks for sharing!

My sister installed mint on my grandma's laptop but she would ask us if she needed help.

Is this satire? Forgive me, but 99.999% of the population has no idea what a kernel is. Also, since when would a mouse care about your kernel version? Puzzling post.

I'm imagining, it said on the packaging of the mouse that it needed that kernel version.
In Linux, the kernel delivers most drivers, so it may not yet have had the appropriate mouse driver in kernel versions before that.
- Maybe this is possible, but typically you're lucky to even find Linux support mentioned at all.

That old lady's name? Albert Einstein.

Mouse? Sure. Those are standardized and interchangeable. 99.999% chance of success.

Graphics card? Wi-Fi interface? Now you've got problems.

My experience is still a good success rate there. Back in ~2015 my family got an USB WiFi card which needed an out-of-tree module, which the manufacturer had on Github, complete with DKMS instructions. It was upstreamed after about a year, though!
The only completely unsupported device I've had is my laptop's fingerprint sensor.
- You won't be having such a good experience with a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. Broadcom and NVIDIA have nothing but contempt for the Linux community.
Even then 99% of the time it’s just installing a single package to fix it. Just gotta check the lookup table on the wiki
- I'm afraid that's not true. Attempting to use an NVIDIA GPU will cause problems. You can kinda-sorta mitigate some of them, kinda-sorta, but not really, and the web is filled with people complaining about said problems.
Graphics card is generally ok if it's AMD, and Nvidia is also ok with a bit of extra with. Intel I've never used anything that wasn't built in.
For wifi, Intel or Atheros cards are high chances of just working. Some other stuff can be hit or miss but I've found most recent USB adaptors are ok.

What grocery store and where? I set up Linux Mint for my Mom. She's 67.

Don't really want to doxx myself, but in the Helsinki area
- BRB, gotta make some phone calls, Mom's lost in Finland apparently.
- More Finns should be using Linux, specially considering its Finnish origins.
  Also, hello from the other side of Östersjön 👋

Why do you lie like this?

I work in IT and my hate for baby boomers is real but after reading this I am less hateful. Thanks

asked if I knew anything about computers

lol you got profiled. nice that you could help her tho

Reminds of Penthouse Forum stories.

I worked retail in electronics for quite a while and all the linux people I encountered were turbonerds for the most part. Thankfully I think that is changing. I imagine this lady had one of her family members set her up of course.

I've been thinking about switching to Mint in my linux experiments, setting up Arch was fun and all but I think I want a bit less fiddling.

I think I want a bit less fiddling
Indeed. That's why I switched to NixOS, set up once (which can be a major PITA), but then you're done anytime you want to do that again in the future.
But I'm thinking of trying Debian, seeing if I can get it set up the way I want, and maybe switching to that in the future?

Hey, thank you again, OP.

I'll take "Stories That Didn't Happen" for 500, Alex.

So you're the nice boy from the store? Good to see you here. I got my mouse connected and can now browse fediverse using my Linux Mint. BTW I've checked and I'm running Linux kernel version 6.2.9. Should I update?

Assuming this story is true, Linux is going to be a nightmare for that woman. It’s come a long way, but it’s still not as dead simple as it needs to be for non-technical elderly people.

tbh: she probably clicks on the thing that says "INTERNET" and thats it. I've been setting up a few computers in my family for people 50+ and they mostly don't even know the name of the program they use and mix it all up. I then just install a program and prefix the shortcut with the service. Like "MAIL Outlook", "INTERNET Firefox" so they know where to go.
I've seen stripped down versions of Android on phones intended specifically for the elderly. I wonder if anyone has approached desktop Linux development like that?
Couldn't disagree more. Do non-techies need anything more than a browser nowadays? Maybe a word processor? The process of turning on and opening a web browser on Mint are practically no different from Windows. Hardware will plug and play just the same. Using printers is equally intuitive (ie, not very). In fact, I can find firefox on GNOME by just pressing the Win key and typing "internet" or "browser".
Both are probably equally likely to run into incomprehensible tech problems that require techie intervention.
- Just connecting to the internet on various networks can be confusing. And they're going to need to periodically upgrade system packages, or they'll be vulnerable to various exploits. Even if you set up auto-upgrades, occasionally some things will need manual intervention.