My dad refuses to upgrade his 16.04 laptop

[salamilimos]

Back in 2016, the hard drive of my dad's laptop finally gave out after 10 years of usage. The original OS of his laptop was Windows XP and his laptop is a 64-bit Dell Inspiron E1505 with 2GB RAM. So when his hard drive gave out, I installed Lubuntu 16.04 on it because Windows XP was outdated already.

Now, my dad is refusing to upgrade to 20.04 just like he refused to upgrade to 18.04. My dad's reasoning is that his laptop is working fine as is and he doesn't want to change it and also he reasons that he was safe in Windows XP despite it being unsupported, so he thinks he will be safe on Lubuntu 16.04 despite it being unsupported.

Well, I can't force him to upgrade if he doesn't want to, it's his laptop, his property. My dad mainly uses the laptop for Facebook and YouTube video watching and he doesn't do online banking at all on his laptop because he's old fashioned that way.

How safe is he?

[hk42]

IMHO the main reason to upgrade in Linux is to support new hardware not security.
But it is very easy to have several distributions with Grub allowing you to choose at boot.
When you replace a 10 years old HD you have room to install 5 OS

[Dennis N]

It would be safer if he maintains an up-to-date web browser. For Firefox, download and manually install the latest Firefox version from Mozilla.org - it is self-updating.

[grahammechanical]

I find that web sites are taking longer to load. Yes, my machine is old but It runs Ubuntu 20.04 without any difficulty. Yes, web sites embed advertising. They also link to tracking and analytical sites. It is natural for a web site owner to want to know how many people are visiting the site and what pages or products they are clicking on. Some web sites, in my opinion, take this too far and even go so far as selling data harvested by trackers and analytics.

How safe are the sites that do this? It is safe to stand on the edge of a cliff until we fall off. Then we are no longer safe. This is all part of the complexities of life.

It is a false sense of security to think that the main reason for upgrading is to get hardware drivers for newer hardware. There are security fixes that are applied when we update/upgrade. This will no longer happen with 16.04.

See Ubuntu's Weekly Newsletter for this week. Scroll down to the heading Updates and Security for 18.04, 20.04 and 21.04. Six months ago 16.04 would have been included in that heading.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2466660

Regards

[TheFu]

Has his home router been properly maintained? If it hasn't been patched in the last month, that answer is no.
Security is about layered protection. Email clients and web browsers skip the network-based protections, so that system could be a ticking timebomb.

Does he have backups? What happens if the HDD fails? Will he lose everything? If so, what then?
When he goes onto the internet, he can use a live-boot flash drive with a patched release. Probably would want to setup a persistent Lubuntu 20.04 with mkusb for him. Then he can become comfortable using the new OS without risking his current OS.

Does he have a DNS blocker on the network? Something like a pihole that gets updated lists of "bad" web sites on the internet?
Does he have an updated ad-blocker for his browser?
Is he prone to downloading anything?

Every computer will eventually fail. There will be software issues, lazy bits on the HDD, and hardware failures.
All kernels have zero-day, full access, bugs. With a supported release, those get fixed and we are notified a few weeks later. With an unsupported release, those never get fixed. This is the primary reason why home routers that aren't actively maintained and patched monthly are generally not very secure. A home router with a remote access bug (they've all had them), will become a launch point to access the rest of the home network. Nobody is out to get HIM, specifically. They have scripts that search for weaknesses and get inside all the systems in that way.

You know, he can sign up for ESM for free for 1 system and continue to get patched. https://ubuntu.com/security/esm I think formal ubuntu members can have 50 systems supported for free. That will get him to 20.04 April.

[monkeybrain20122]

Well how about installing 20.04 in an external hd and persuade your dad to boot off it once in a while until he is comfortable and then replace 16.04 with that? Don't do "upgrade", always backup data and do a fresh install, otherwise you will be blamed if something goes wrong (or just clone the system in the external drive, wipe the internal drive and then restore system in the external to the internal hd)

[GhX6GZMB]

Leave your dad's machine alone. It works perfectly, and with his use of it, I see no perils.
An upgrade would lead to a major shift to LXQt, which would create further problems/frictions.

I'm worried more about you. You seem to suffer from chronic "upgradeitis", which is not a good thing. There's no need to change a winning team. I run Lubuntu 20.04 LTS and sleep well at night. The "Must upgrade, must upgrade, must upgrade to 21.10" fever has never caught on with me.

Cheers.

[TheFu]

Leave your dad's machine alone. It works perfectly, and with his use of it, I see no perils.

Good advice for a system that isn't on any network.

[guiverc]

The oldest Lubuntu system I'd dare to run online with be Lubuntu 18.04 LTS. Even though the desktop itself is EOL (the oldest supported release for Lubuntu is currently Lubuntu 20.04 LTS), at least the `firefox` browser is supported/patched as it's from the 'main' repository being common with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop - ie. 5 years of support for packages from 'main'.

I in fact still have a thinkpad t43 that uses Lubuntu 18.04 LTS; it however isn't amd64 (64-bit) so the only upgrade I have possible for that is replacing it with Debian (which runs; I used the box to pre-release QA-test Debian 10/Buster & 11/Bullseye and had no issues) but I haven't felt the need as I don't use it for anything online.

If he wants the LXDE desktop; you can run that on 20.04 too. I've read support issues where users have difficulty (adding LXDE to 20.04 server), but the little testing I did was adding LXDE to a Lubuntu 20.04 LTS system and I encountered no issues.

I wouldn't want to stick on 16.04 if you're online, and my preference would be 20.04 with LXDE if he wants the same desktop (it won't be supported by Lubuntu; LXDE is supported in general Ubuntu areas though). At a minimum though I'd use Lubuntu 18.04 LTS (no longer a Lubuntu supported product so it's generic Ubuntu support anyway).

[vo-nguyen]

That laptop is probably 32 bit. Ubuntu dropped 32 bit since 18.04. You could try your luck copying Debian testing 32 bit libraries, but I wouldn't recommend it.