This is a devils advocate post in response to my original post "Reasons your parents should use Linux". Though my original post intended to explain 5 reasons you should switch your parents to Linux, this post will address what many people have commented on in the past few days. 5 reasons why you should NOT switch your parents to Linux.

A lot of tech-savvy indivuals face the same dilema: their parents, who aren’t so tech-savvy, count on them to provide constant technical support for their Mom & Dad PC. This can become an incredible burden in a Windows world, where the dangers of spyware, viruses, and total system meltdown loom large.

If you work as a System Administrator - or really any of the IT-type support roles - you may be similar to me. Specifically, I’m torn between two extremes. On the one hand, I have an innate (or perhaps adopted through hard knocks) desire to control absolutely every aspect of my machine.

Earlier today on PC World, Harry McCracken had a pair of articles titled “Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a PC” and “Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a Mac“. Well, since Harry didn’t complete the series, I’ll do it for him, so here we go.

There are hundreds of stories about people who pulled an old Windows 95/98/ME computer out of their basement, put some kind of Linux distro on it, and are in a computing heaven, blissfully unaware of the age of their computer. Here are a few reasons.

Recently, Intel announced that they have sold around 500,000 Classmate PCs to Portugal (these are a competitor to the XO). The part of the story that caught my attention, though, was the decision to let the parents of the children who will be receiving these laptops choose what operating system they want installed, Windows or LInux. At first, this idea strikes me as a bad idea, for two reasons.

"Slashdot has an entry about a lawsuit filed this week by parents of a Texas minor whose photograph was used by Virgin Australia in an advertising campaign. The photograph was taken by an adult. He posted it to Flickr under a CC-Attribution license.

A good friend of mine, who is very computer savvy, recently bought a new computer and installed Ubuntu on it rather than Windows. Now, despite being a very smart guy when it comes to PCs and Windows, he was still a newbie to the world of Ubuntu, so he and I went through a series of questions and answers before, during, and after his Ubuntu install.

With my parents living in Italy, my phone bill is often a little on the scary side when I see it each month. That was until recently, when my parents’ tiny village in the middle of the mountains where they run a bed and breakfast finally got broadband.