# The Ubuntu Forum Community > Other Discussion and Support > Ubuntu Women >  Does your daughter use Linux?

## macogw

Just wondering, how many of you who are parents have Linux only on your own machine but not on the family machine?  Why?

One of the Kubuntu devs mentioned that when he got a netbook with XP on it and booted the XP to test the hardware before putting Kubuntu Netbook Edition on, his 6 year old daughter saw it over his shoulder and asked "what's that?"  He realized that she'd never seen XP before.  At home, all of the computers have KDE.  At school, they all have OSX.

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## robert_leeuw

Well, I can tell you,

my daughter is only 6 months old and hopefully an Ubuntu fan in a growing stage!
My son is almost 6 years old, and running Ubuntu 9.04 on his desktop.

The woman of the house can't get used  on Ubuntu, therefor she is running Mircosoft XP.
I am thinking of swapping to Ubuntu Studio this for my Renoise Ardour ZynAddSubFX Hydogen hobby...

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## PRMan

My 11-year-old daughter actually *asked* for Linux.  I had an old server that I was trying to turn into a desktop machine for them so they would stop hogging my wife's computer, and Windows XP continually locked up.

So she actually asked me, "Daddy, can we put Ubuntu on there?"  We did, but the problem was that you can't replace the graphics card on the server and Flash was just too slow for their web games with business graphics (H/W optimization was "faked" in the video driver).

So, they got fed up with Ubuntu and started preferring Mom's fast new machine again.  

Finally, we decided to buy out my wife's old computer on lease and just set that back up for her.  I took the brand new fast computer and put Windows 7 on it and it screams.  I am now using the Ubuntu server to replace my old Ubuntu server that was an old desktop computer.  I pretty much only use it for backups and just to play with Linux occasionally or if I need some Linux command-line tools to hook a drive to or something.

Ubuntu was an attractive option as opposed to Vista, but Windows 7 makes it rather pointless for me (I am an MSDN subscriber).  I put Windows 7 on my netbook and upgraded my server to Windows Server 2008 R2.  My wife is still using XP because she has so many things saved on it, it would be a pain to change her over (she didn't even like the new machine because of that).

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## Little Bit

For me it's the other way around! I'm the daughter who uses Ubuntu and trying to get her parents to use it, lol. My mom likes it (we're using the remix I started on for her computer), but Daddy is stuck on Vista.

Amy

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## running_rabbit07

We don't have a family computer. The desktop is mine with Hardy. My Wife has a laptop with Vista soon to be upgraded with Window 7. My daughter's system died when we upgraded it to Jaunty and is unrecoverable until I learn how to network boot a system. She does get to use Macs at her new school though.

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## Swagman

3 daughters who all dual boot Ubuntu.

Two of them spend most time in Ubuntu... The Middle One (Kelly) is heavy into art and spends most time in XP using Artrage with her Wacom tablet... 

That reminds me.. She asked me to get her tablet working again in Ubuntu. Upgrade borked it.

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## BaphometAten

My Five year old has TinkBuntu (Custom Tinkerbell Edition I set up for her) on her XPS.  The wife is on XP on her netbook but Jaunty on her desktop.

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## skirkpatrick

Our server is Ubuntu, my desktop is Ubuntu, my wife's desktop is Ubuntu, the laptop dual-boots with XP & Ubuntu, my 25 year old daughter uses Ubuntu, and my 22 year old son uses XP.  We all play WoW but my son plays a lot of heavier games so he doesn't want Linux on his machine.  My daughter has asked me occasionally (like when Spore came out) about converting her machine to XP and every time I tell her that she'll have to buy a legal copy before I install it for her and then it is her problem to maintain.  Funny that she has changed yet.

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## macogw

> For me it's the other way around! I'm the daughter who uses Ubuntu and trying to get her parents to use it, lol. My mom likes it (we're using the remix I started on for her computer), but Daddy is stuck on Vista.
> 
> Amy


That's my position, but I'm grown and out of the house now, so I don't count me as the daughter using Ubuntu  :Capital Razz:  I was thinking of munchkins  :Smile:

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## wub

YES!!

I have two daughters, both of whom use Linux.  One is a senior in college, who has a dual-boot system, but never boots Windows.  The other is a junior in high school whose eeepc is Linux-only.  Both have been Linux users for at least two years.

My son, however, uses a Mac (OSX).

Oh well...

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## Michelle_Qimo

Yes, but she's 4, and doesn't recognize that it's anything other than her computer.   :Smile: 

They both use Qimo.

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## sagarhshah

don't have any kids yet
but I've got my 19 yr old sister running a custom ubuntu desktop I built for her.
And I have also gotten my brothers 6yr old daughter running edubuntu on a desktop that I recycled for her.

She came to me the other saying they had a computer class in school where they were taught how to use something called windows xp.

Also I have gotten my mum using xubuntu although she doesn't realise that its not window...all she wanted was that "little blue e that starts the internet" on her desktop.
Cue install opera make it look like ie and swap the icon for the "little e" icon.

Yes my house is almost windows free...the only problem is I have to use windows for work sometimes. Thank god for vmware and virtualbox

tc
Sagar

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## MC707

> don't have any kids yet
> but I've got my 19 yr old sister running a custom ubuntu desktop I built for her.


19 year old chick running Linux? Wow, never heard that one before. At least not where I live  :Sad:

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## murderslastcrow

I don't have a daughter, but my brother and sister-in-law just got hooked on Ubuntu, and we're thinking of cracking out their old PC so that my niece can use GCompris.

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## Irihapeti

I don't have a daughter, but I have a daughter-in-law who uses Ubuntu.

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## hotstovejer

Heck, my sons, daughter, and wife all use Linux. Only hassle I get is from my youngest son, who freaks out when I can't get some obscure game working under wine, but you know, for all the time I save not having to clean up a windows machine, I would much rather spend trying to get something to work in Wine. 

The kids also don't like the fact that I can monitor their time spent on the computer, or log into their machine from my G1. My oldest son loves it, my oldest daughter is ok with it except for stuff like "Why can't I have AIM on this computer?" and my wife loves it. 

My mother and father use it, my brother uses it, and I am ok with that.I enjoy trying to fix unix stuff as opposed to trying to troubleshoot windows issues.

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## steev182

This is my dream...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

But I can see my houshold being OSX and Linux...

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## macogw

> my oldest daughter is ok with it except for stuff like "Why can't I have AIM on this computer?" and my wife loves it.


Is she not allowed, or does she not realise Pidgin does it?




> 19 year old chick running Linux? Wow, never heard that one before. At least not where I live


This is the women's forum, isn't it?  Did you just assume everyone here was over the age of 50...?  I've been using Ubuntu since I was 17, and I'm 21 now, so yeah, when I was 19 I was a "19 year old chick running Linux."

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## wildnfree

> Originally Posted by MC707
> 
> 
> 19 year old chick running Linux? Wow, never heard that one before. At least not where I live 
> 
> 
> This is the women's forum, isn't it?  Did you just assume everyone here was over the age of 50...?  I've been using Ubuntu since I was 17, and I'm 21 now, so yeah, when I was 19 I was a "19 year old chick running Linux."


Hi Maco!

I'm well over 50 now, and the only reason I wasn't running Linux when I was a 19 year old was that it was many decades before Linux was first designed, and computers in those days took up a much larger space than the house I lived in  :Wink: 

Mind you I was hacking a magnetic core computer long before I was 19  :Smile:

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## hotstovejer

> Is she not allowed, or does she not realise Pidgin does it?


Oh, she knows she can do it, but she wants all the bloatware that comes with AIM. I didn't even tell her that you could install it in wine, cause frankly, she doesn't need it.

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## Amanda HazLaPaz

I have no daughter, only a son*, although my 'daughters-by-proxy' (my students) use an Ubuntu box in my classroom. I am forced by university policy to have MS XP on the 16 lab computers, but I adopted two orphaned MS machines and did a complete reinstall of Ubuntu 8.10 (now on 9.04). Since it's really only used for Internet stuff, like educational sites and YouTube music videos, they don't get explored much in other regards by either gender (same with the MS machines). However, there haven't been any problems or difficulties with getting places and making stuff work.

The Ubuntu machines are MUCH less work for me than the MS machines running their fancy monitoring software, which constantly drops machines and falls off the network. Ubuntu just works... even despite being on the 'slower' machine.

I'm in a bilingual classroom, so I have one of the Ubuntu boxes set up in Spanish.

*Son uses Ubuntu, happily, and my husband just made the leap last month from struggling with Vista for 6 months to _asking_ me to put just Ubuntu on his machine so that I would be his tech support.

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## Catarina

Got no daughter, actually *I'M* the daughter, and the only computers over here that use a Linux distro are both my desktop and laptop (Mint 7, Kubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11), my brother has a kind-of eeePC that dual-boots XP and Caixa Mágica KDE (a portuguese Mandriva-based distro, which is nice, the support and Linux communities have arrived, I'm just waiting for people to broaden their horizons beyond Windows) but my stepdad's laptop runs Windows XP Pro (professional requirement, the computer isn't even his, so. And even if it were, he's not designed to work with computers, and I honestly don't feel like putting up with him) and the family desktop a.k.a. my mom's workspace/total document chaos is running this really bloated and slow Windows XP that hasn't been either defragmented or formatted for years! Do you imagine? :O

So, my mom watches me installing like 5 different distro per week (it used to be more) but still doesn't really bothers to know more about it, and honestly, she's not up to the challenge. She does not even know how to copy & paste files. *facepalm*

But no worries, I've been trying to change the world piece by piece, some of my friends already use Linux and I talk about it to everyone, in hope that people's mind opens up. Oh, and yes, my daughters will not know the meaning of the word "Windows".  :Capital Razz:

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## Docaltmed

My 16-year-old daughter needs a laptop for school, and absolutely refuses to go with Ubuntu. I'm a fairly recent adopter of Ubuntu, and although I've successfully migrated my company to Ubuntu, as you might guess, I have somewhat more sway with my employees than with my daughters. 

I caught the 12-year-old in time, she loves Kubuntu. 

But I can't seem to develop an argument or rationale that would help me convince Daughter #1.

Suggestions?

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## Amanda HazLaPaz

> My 16-year-old daughter needs a laptop for school, and absolutely refuses to go with Ubuntu. I'm a fairly recent adopter of Ubuntu, and although I've successfully migrated my company to Ubuntu, as you might guess, I have somewhat more sway with my employees than with my daughters. 
> 
> I caught the 12-year-old in time, she loves Kubuntu. 
> 
> But I can't seem to develop an argument or rationale that would help me convince Daughter #1.
> 
> Suggestions?


Does she run with a crowd that takes a strong stance on "geeks"? 

Find someone that she thinks is "cool" and get them hooked on Ubuntu. Do you want to go so far as to buy an Ubuntu-installed laptop? (LOL)  I find the most frustrating thing about dealing with teenagers is that things are much cooler if they come from someone who is not Mom or Dad. We often enlist the help of family friends to communicate with our son in a way that we can't.

Best of luck!

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## macogw

> My 16-year-old daughter needs a laptop for school, and absolutely refuses to go with Ubuntu. I'm a fairly recent adopter of Ubuntu, and although I've successfully migrated my company to Ubuntu, as you might guess, I have somewhat more sway with my employees than with my daughters.


Tell her if she gets a virus, she's on her own?

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## Guyon

Heh, I need to start taking names and numbers.  :Wink: 

[16 yr old male user]

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## Chronon

I run Kubuntu on my desktop machine (though I also have GNOME installed) and my nine year old daughter has her own account.  I do have XP installed but it really doesn't ever get used.  She still doesn't use it very often, but anytime she wants to do something I encourage her to switch to her account and try to do it for herself.  She is already a bit familiar with programs like the GIMP at school and she has picked up Impress very quickly after they did some Keynote presentations in class.  

She's in a good position to grow up with a positive experience of Linux (Ubuntu, specifically).  I seem to have a good track record with hardware compatibility.

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## sgosnell

My daughter uses it since I gave her my old EEE PC.  She's planning to use it for running video clips for her band.  The little EEE is perfect for this, being so portable and robust with SSD instead of a HDD.

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## luctor

My son (4 yr) uses Mac OSX and Ubuntu ... well he draws (stamps) pictures with Tux Paint ..

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## macogw

> Heh, I need to start taking names and numbers. 
> 
> [16 yr old male user]


No you don't.

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## badger_fruit

To reply to the original question, yes, my daughter (9 years old) uses Open Suse 10.3 on the PC in her bedroom, Suse 11.0 in my bedroom, XP and Win 7 on the main "Media Centre" PC ... I truly believe in educating her (and my 4 year old son) into other platforms, after all, when she goes into work then she's already 100 times more qualified than the other plebs she's going to be up against in job interviews who only know windows.

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## urosg3

My daughter 8 years have own computer with cp6linux, its Serbian distro, based on Ubuntu, developed by community and supported by Government

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## starcannon

At home Linux is all my kids use. At school Windows is all my kids use. So far they have done really well with this "balance". I would like to work OSX into the mix somewhere, but thats a matter of economics really.

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## Bu7753x

I use Arch, my brother uses Crunchbang, my parents use Kubuntu, my grandmother uses Debian, my cousin uses Fluxbuntu, my employer uses Red Hat 5, my best friends all use Fedora or Ubuntu (except for one oddball who uses FreeBSD), and my 90 year old great grandfather uses Solaris.

We're all *nix people here.

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## pony

I am not a parent I am actually ten, but I do use linux. My dad 67GTA does too.

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## CRAY-4

im 14 so i dont have any daughters(thank god i dont). however i do have 3 siblings, a 4 year old brother, a 7 year old sister, and an 11 year old sister.

the 4 year old loves to play color phonics(wine), Gcompris, and Tux Paint on the family PC.
the 7 year old likes to do the same, and the 11 year old does that and plays world of goo and phun on the family pc, which runs ubuntu 9.10


my dad is not as literate in the art of GUI, but now he is fine w/ ubuntu and both of my parents own a G1(both rooted by yours truly)
they like the fact that ubuntu 9.10 has an "app store" just like android does.


as for me i run ubuntu 9.10 and i am usually browsing forums/linux news, developing some obscure program, or programming my arduino robot with the arduino-ide(made a deb of it yesterday arduino-ide(32-bit))
or im just playing half life 2(episode 1 or 2) or portal in wine which runs perfect with a few minor tweaks :Very Happy:

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## 78ufzniyE4

Yes! I'm 11 years of age and am a boy and I still love Ubuntu Linux. My father was afraid that I might break my first laptop but it didnt. An Acer Aspire 4736Z did the job and it works perfectly. Now im on 9.10 and loving my *** of because it is so AMAZING! To be cool to see that I am so inteligent for my age is so cool. I am sort of a GIMP fan and love hacking into local computers and MIDs. I created a python module with a little help from one of the devs of BackTrack Linux and works great. I think that later when I grow up I'll join the Linux Foundation. The earth might fall in 2012 but we are making our own planet... Linux. GNU is a great group that formed and one day I WILL see Linus Torvaldus and Richard Stallman. Well to see that Linux is the only building company in USA and Canada, I'm very happy to see Microsoft going down to the ground. If any one of your kids want to know more stuff about Linux then let me talk to them in #ubuntu-offtopic. I will soon be building a nice new chanel

Thanks to Me!

    <snip>

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## Newbez

:Capital Razz:   :Capital Razz:  I can't believe she's never seen Windows XP even though it's the biggest OS out there. Personally, I prefer the Windows OS because I'm a total Ubuntu n00b. Your daughter is probably better than me.

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## CRAY-4

> I can't believe she's never seen Windows XP even though it's the biggest OS out there. Personally, I prefer the Windows OS because I'm a total Ubuntu n00b. Your daughter is probably better than me.


Windows 7 is nice(unfortunately), however the best way to learn about linux is to dive in, i plunged into linux when i was 9 and i was the only computer literate(ish) person in the house.

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## steveneddy

> Just wondering, how many of you who are parents have Linux only on your own machine but not on the family machine?  Why?
> 
> One of the Kubuntu devs mentioned that when he got a netbook with XP on it and booted the XP to test the hardware before putting Kubuntu Netbook Edition on, his 6 year old daughter saw it over his shoulder and asked "what's that?"  He realized that she'd never seen XP before.  At home, all of the computers have KDE.  At school, they all have OSX.


I have a system76 laptop with Ubuntu.

Daughter in college has a System76 laptop AND a MacBook Pro with dual boot OSX and Vista.

Other daughter goes back and forth between Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS. And she does the installing herself. She won't even let me in the room when installing. says she doesn't need my help - lol.

And I will purchase, after the first of the year, a new laptop from System76 because this one is three years old now and I'm ready for a new one.

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## tomsa

We have three computers in the house.  My 13 year old uses an old Dell desktop running Hardy for her schoolwork, and hasn't looked back since I put her on it because she knows well enough to save her files in .doc, .ppt, etc. so she can open projects on school computers as well.  The wife has a vista/intrepid dual booting laptop that windows hasn't been booted into in at least a year that I know of.  My computer is a Dual boot vista (hasn't been used for vista in about a year and a half)/ karmic/ virtualbox XP setup.  We've all pretty much sworn off the Windows.  It is so good.  My wife doesn't like the insecurity of windows, so she never uses it.  Life is good.  I love my geek girls!

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## Bucky Ball

I'm married to a daughter (someone elses!) who sang the praises of Ubuntu until eventually her mother asked me to build her a new computer ... Ubuntu, open-source only! She is almost seventy.  :Smile:

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## CRAY-4

wow, thats amazing

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## Bucky Ball

She loves it! Got sick to death of Windows after years and just decided to change OS totally.

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## CRAY-4

wish everybody was like that

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## ames3d

I have 3 daughters ages 2,4 & 6.  They've never known anything but Ubuntu.  They play Gcompris "the airplane game" and I have a link set up for them to Starfall.  My 6 year old has her own username/pw.  They play under her profile.  I've also set up her gmail account through Evolution.  I'm wondering how this is going to play out because she just started Kindergarten this semester.  (we were previously home schooling) and they have Windows machines set up there.  My husband just reloaded his old laptop (now our family computer) with 9.10.  Running XP on virtualbox.  He just got me a Dell mini netbook for Christmas with UNR 9.10.  I don't like UNR so I will likely reload plain 9.10 when I get a chance...I'm going to need help!  I've been running ubuntu for about 4 years now.  Husband has to run Windows for work purposes....runs Ubuntu virtuals on virtualbox.

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## ndefontenay

> Oh, she knows she can do it, but she wants all the bloatware that comes with AIM. I didn't even tell her that you could install it in wine, cause frankly, she doesn't need it.


I got the exact same problem here. My step daughter asked for ubuntu (she knows it from my laptop) after she asked me for maintaining her Vista laptop. I explained that I got rid of windows for that one reason and I would agree to install ubuntu instead.

Her laptop is now dual booted but she has difficulties adapting to it. She wants the bloatwares of msn messenger. It's all pink and glitters and it matters when it comes to her friends. She also has difficulties at school where she has homework to do on her computer and they request a .doc format.

She's 12. But Ubuntu is not an instant love hate thing and I'm happy that she knows about it and likes playing wormux. She has tried a lot of stuff out there. I think she knows the repository (mainly the game part) better than me.

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## uRock

My 6 year old daughter loves her Ubuntu. She spends a few hours a day playing Supertux2, Supertuxkart, Sudoku, and uses Firefox to play the learning games and sing-a-longs on www.starfall.com. She knows how to hook up all of the wires in the proper place and she even changed out her graphics card on her own, then installed the nvidia driver. She is the nerd at school that asks the teacher why the Apples take so long to boot.

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## macogw

> She also has difficulties at school where she has homework to do on her computer and they request a .doc format.


OOo can output .doc (select file type from the dropdown when saving).  If you like, you can configure .doc, .xls, and .ppt to be the default through Tools -> Options.

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## pricetech

> My Five year old has TinkBuntu (Custom Tinkerbell Edition I set up for her)


Nice.  I have a couple of Grandgirls who would like such a thing.

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## brydonhunter

My son is running Ubuntu and is happy except when he runs into the "Windows" only games.

My wife hates computers and always swore at me when she used Win XP. Sh doesn't yell at me anymore with her Ubuntu Remix install.

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## kazordoon

my children, a girl, 5, and a boy, 4, they both use Linux (Debian) on a desktop PC. I tried to convince my wife to use Linux as well but apparently she's not as flexible as the young ones and prefers to stick to windows.

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