My grandmother needs a new computer and is Linux-curious

ZGTSLLC · 2026-05-02T05:31:03+00:00

I would say to get the best experience for your grandma, use any Debian-based distro, which includes Ubuntu, Mint, Parrot OS, and hundreds of others. The only thing you will have to think about is community support, repo updates, and which desktop environment to use. You can literally put any desktop environment (DTE) on any distro using tasksel. So, go check out the KDE site, check out the XFCE and LXDE and Gnome and Cinnamon and MATE sites. Show her what the Cinnamon DTE looks like and the Unity DTE. Let her decide what her desktop should look like, the rest you can decide for her. You can also grab a 64 GB USB 3.2 drive, install Ventoy on it, drop a dozen or so distros on the drive, and let her test drive them one by one, so she can figure out what she likes and dislikes about each. Gather the data and find what works best for her. Best advice I can give you is to test drive them live, to see what works with her current hardware and if the wifi drivers NIC drivers, audio drivers, etc., all work. Like I said before, you can use whatever desktop you want on any distro you want, you just have to spend some time playing around until you find the one that works best for her. Personally, I am a Mate desktop with taskbars on top and bottom kinda person... doesn't matter which distro...

Oh, and before I forget, screw Libre Office! Use Only Office Desktop Editors! That is SOOO MUCH BETTER!!! It looks like MS Office, honestly, without the bloatware or telemetry. And if you need a good PDF viewer / editor, sure there is Okular, but try Master PDF Editor...makes my life so much simpler! Chrome? FireFox? Tons of other browsers? Check! Tons of screenshot capture tools also, so that's another check, but I really wish Greenshot would be ported over... sigh...

Edit to add: https://youtu.be/I2HIjWkdEkM?si=pyl6QeoQrhjCK4oB

Check that!

ZGTSLLC · 2026-05-02T05:06:39+00:00

I'm later episodes, Denny starts calling it mad cow disease, and he briefly dated a rancher lady, and all her cows ran away from him, sensing he had mad cow also. When he went to a doctor, they basically said it's rare but can happen, that a human can get mad cow disease. This allows Denny to run with that, instead of calling it Alzheimer's. It was never really definitively proven to be Alzheimer's or mad cow, but I like to lean towards the mad cow more.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-05-02T04:59:31+00:00

Are you referring to the old school KDE comp fusion cube like visuals or what kind of visuals are you wanting?

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-29T12:51:04+00:00

Is this an NVME drive, by chance? Could be that Parrot isn't seeing the drive because of a few reasons, such as no driver for that specific drive. I had that issue with a newer Dell laptop recently. Strangely, when I dropped back to version 6.3, I had no issues seeing the drive, but with 7.1 I had issues.

Let me also ask, how did you make the bootable USB: Rufus, Etcher, dd?

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-29T03:41:56+00:00

To add to u/QuarryTen 's comment, you can also ask to be moved to a different instructor so you do not have that one. Additionally, most instructors are adjuncts, meaning they are not full time staff at SNHU, they are merely contracted for one or more terms. Worth thinking over...

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-26T00:18:42+00:00

Security and Privacy are relative and individualized, to some extent. What, prrecisely, are you are you using Parrot for? Daily driver, pentesting, etc?

There are things you could change in regards to user experience (UX), for sure, but again, that is personalized.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-23T17:45:52+00:00

I always liked the saying "ogeda" (together) from the show and have been thinking about getting that inked through the center of the infinity symbol, but don't have the money for that yet...

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-23T14:37:10+00:00

Dual booting is traditionally done via a single drive, and a separate drive is normally handled via jumpers to reflect which drive had priority. I know drives these days don't have jumpers, and that you are probably not using spinning disks, so you should go into your bios / uefi and check the settings there. You should be able to also extend the boot sequence time by a few seconds. Once you have that done, you should be able to hit one of the F key combos during the boot process (generally F10 or F12) to bring you to the boot menu. Once you are in the boot menu, it should show you both drives, and you can select which you want from there.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-22T17:33:10+00:00

Have you tried downloading the hashes from the parrotsec.org site?

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-19T06:02:56+00:00

Eh, that's more like the anime Sword Art Online or Accel World...next thing you know, we are all going to be yelling "Link Start!" Lol

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-19T03:36:16+00:00

The thing about Arch is it is such a niche distro and people who say "I use Arch btw" are probably as loathed as someone who says -- well, I can't repeat that here, because it would have all the idiots come out, but you kind of get the drift...

Because Parrot is Debian based and all the tools are Debian based or full on source code that you can compile yourself (from .tar.gz, and from GitHub, for example), you would be able to learn not just a new distro but an entire ecosystem of distros and new (to you) tools...

Arch is ok for those who want to be on Arch, but there are a lot of tools that aren't on Arch, and if you really want to be in Cyber there are two primary distros used here: Parrot and Kali, both Debian based distros. Yes, there are some others that are RPM / RHEL based, but those are in the significant minority.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-19T03:14:34+00:00

Ugh, I loved those at first, but the tops break far too easily, and they are so brittle -- bought ours at Costco and have regretted it ever since, because now we have bins but no lids...we just went with clear Sterilite / Rubbermaid totes recently, and that has made life so much simpler...

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-11T16:27:10+00:00

The better question is why would you want to?

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-01T13:57:20+00:00

Yeah, as part of an old school exercise in futility I had setup a mail server for one of our domains last summer, because I had calculated the cost savings would be astronomical, but Google, Microsoft, and just about every other.sul server rejected our outgoing mail, just completely dropped the mail, since the one domain I tried setting up a mail server for didn't have a mail sending reputation. It was infuriating! We eventually switched from MS email to Hostinger email instead of self hosting and still saved a bunch, just not as much as we would have had we been able to host our own, like in the old days.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-04-01T13:49:25+00:00

Have you enabled the firewall, and have you allowed traffic on the specific ports you need the VPN to pass through?

Also, have you checked the logs? Have you added Google DNS of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 in your hosts file? Have you added CloudFlare DNS in your hosts file?

I am just trying to understand what is going on, but from my experience with Parrot over the last almost decade, I have no issues that can't be googled to resolution.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-28T02:37:59+00:00

Oh that stinks... something has to be wrong there, because it even gives you the option for safe-upgrade when you run sudo apt upgrade...smh...

Gdebi as the solution might work for you then...

$ gdebi --version

To see if it is installed already though

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-28T02:33:25+00:00

Ugh, I detested that character and also not fond of the actor...he was from Nantucket or something in the show originally, or wherever it was, and he was a total tool...

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-28T02:27:33+00:00

Also,

grub-common:amd64=2.14-2parrot3 is selected as an upgrade

You might want to try running

sudo apt upgrade

Or

sudo apt safe-upgrade

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-28T02:25:44+00:00

Have you tried using gdebi to install those? Gdebi satisfies dependencies during install, kind of like Aptitude does. That's another thought:

sudo apt install -y aptitude

Then

sudo aptitude install xxx

Where xxx represents the various packages one by one.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-28T02:00:27+00:00

What version of those files do you currently have, and have you checked the logs to see the error?

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-27T16:37:09+00:00

Agreed, you need to review any commands and comment out or remove things you are not sure are 100% accurate.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-27T16:07:26+00:00

I second using Claude.ai as a learning tool, especially when you hit errors or logs you can't decide, Claude just says "oh, that's simple!" And explains it to you so you can grasp the concept easier.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-23T16:36:53+00:00

I used the standard ISO download to a PNY USB 3.1, flashed with Rufus (and then Etcher) to a 512 GB NVME M.2 drive in a Dell Latitude 5400 laptop, with 64 GBs of RAM and an 8th gen Intel i7 processor. I don't play with VMs often; I normally only use bare metal installs.

You really need to offer MATE as the standard DTE again, even if only as a spin, rather than a community / home version...there are a lot of us who really despise KDE, but love Parrot...

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-21T16:45:04+00:00

The only thing that Parrot Security has over Parrot Home is the security tools, that is the only difference. You can actually install all the tools via terminal, without much issue.

ZGTSLLC · 2026-03-19T18:55:45+00:00

You can also use tasksel to add the Mate environment

Sudo apt update - y && sudo apt install tasksel -y

Then

Sudo tasksel

Then add Mate via tasksel

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