I never expected the day to come ……… but it did. My dad got fed up with the slowness (and various other problems) of his Windows 7 on his HP mini netbook, with its Intel Atom processor, its NVIDIA graphics card, its 2 gigs of RAM and its 160 gigs of disk. So after months of curiosity, on Sunday I dual-booted it with Manjaro XFCE.
I'm going to start with some questions that you asked me in the previous days.
He asked me how fast - I told him that it is usually faster than Windows. I also chose a light environment to test it. He was shocked when (already with Manjaro installed and running on his machine) he tried to open a page in Firefox.
He asked me about the programs - I told him that most have either linux versions, or alternative programs that do more or less the same thing.
Then I showed him on my machine what it was like to use linux and I told him about the partitions, that both the operating system and the programs are stored in the root and that everything is ordered differently from windows (I told him rather that no there is a folder like Program Files). I had to explain to him that there is a root user and that through this (or rather his permissions) the programs were installed (I showed him graphically) in addition to fiddling with the root partition.
He asked me about extensions (I mean extensions like .exe, .doc, .xls, etc.) - That was difficult to explain… ..very difficult. I had to tell him that the concept of extension that Windows has is VERY different in Linux. For example, linux executables don't necessarily have an extension (I actually told you they don't, but it didn't occur to me at the time to mention .sh), a file that doesn't have an extension isn't necessarily executable (I opened a file from text to show you an example). One day I have to talk to him about the permits.
Then came the installation. To give you an idea of ​​how slow Windows was on your machine, it took an hour to enter disk manager, select reduce volume, wait for it to pull out a figure of how much size it could reduce (about 43 gigs) and do The reduction. During the installation of Manjaro, I just asked him to enter a password that he can remember for his user, and in almost 30 minutes he had it installed.
After installation, you were able to easily create desktop and panel shortcuts, change appearance, plug in a USB disk, plug in your printer and print a test page (thanks CUPS), put the Libreoffice and Firefox in Spanish and other things that already have more to do with the programs themselves and not with the system. For now the only thing he's complaining about is the Faenza icons (he doesn't like them) and updates (I plan to update on Saturday nights).
Now with Manjaro you are planning the migration of your bookmarks and documents (very small size) and if something interesting comes up I'll tell you about it.