I do not for one moment claim or pretend this is "best practice", nor that it is anything likely to find widespread interest or application. It is simply my solution for dealing with #EndOf10 with my 88 y/o dad, in a way that feels his "least worst" option. It is not my preferred solution, but it seems a workable compromise.

I had begun mentioning EoT to him some years ago, but he felt it was too nebulous, scary, & far off, so he ostriched.

In January this year i began mentioning & explaining it to him in more detail, & gently reinforcing to him that he was now only ten months from having to de-ostrich. I began much research & testing in VMs as to potential penguins for him. Having converted myself to The Land of Penguins in 2014 i knew how fab it is, but also that dad is not the geek i am, & also he's far from his sharpest days now, sadly.

The general concept of conversion is quite elementary, once you know, but in dad's case there were a few Important Sticking Points, incl.

• he had to be able to continue using his legacy HW [printer & scanner]
• he had to be able to continue using his legacy windoze greeting cards pgm [sigh]
• he had to be able to continue using his myriad MS Office 2013 spreadsheets & docs

Neither OEM has applicable Linux drivers for those HW, but eventually i was able to get #KFedora & #Mint [VMs (which i setup on his win10 pooter for PoC)] to work serviceably with both, just via the baked-in kernel drivers, albeit far less elegantly & control-nuanced as the proprietary windoze ones.

His docs' need was well met by showing him #LibreOffice & especially #OnlyOffice -- he concurred!

The penguin-unsolvable element was that bloody irritating cards pgm.

So, for the past several months, the plan i hatched for & with him was:

• sometime before mid-Oct, convert his win10 pooter to #Mint or #LMDE [i'd eventually eliminated KFedora, coz now it's #Wayland-only, & my #AnyDesk & #RustDesk #RemoteAccess apps are nfg for that]
• post-conversion, create a win10 VM in the penguin, with its internet disabled, for his silly cards pgm [printing it via the VM shared USB ports]

Within a few weeks of the deadline, it sadly became clear to me that despite all the handholding i had attempted along the way, "Linux" was looming in dad's mind as this terrifying ogre, & he was just miserable. This weighed very very heavily upon me... i wanted to make dad's pootering joyful, not miserable!

At 03:00 one morning i woke with a jolt, with a crazy-mad idea to solve the dilemma. In fact, this is exactly what we have now done:

• abandon my plan per se, or rather, invert it
• keep his current win10 as his physical OS
• create a Mint VM on it, for #Firefox & #Thunderbird
• disable win10 updates
• remove all browsers & TB from win10
• delve into the bowels of the win10 #firewall, & #Registry, to globally disable internet, with a very very few app exceptions, eg, #VirtualBox [for the VM, obvs].
• create a #SharedFolder & #SharedClipboard for him to easily work between his "new" FF + TB, & his Office 2013 apps [which ofc now also no longer see the internet]

This has been HEAPS more work for me than the original plan would have been, but that's unimportant given the primary objective has been met... facilitate dad not being miserable, whilst still keeping him safe & able to "do his stuff".

Fwiw.

#DadsPooterProject