We’ve had computers powerful enough to be effortlessly useful for ages now. In fact, there is probably one in your attic. Even a 10-year-old PC will work perfectly well as a well-connected typewriter, which is all that most people want or need.
And even Windows 98, however much we despise it, is pretty foolproof against user incompetence. The trouble is that it is ridiculously insecure. It ought to be a criminal offence to connect a computer running Windows 98 to the net via broadband.
Anyone who does so is not merely putting their own information at risk, but laying their computer open to the risk of being used to rob third parties as part of a botnet.
There have been huge advances in Windows security since then. If you were to plug your granny into the net with a modern computer running Vista, which she only used for email and a little exploration of shared photos on the web, she would probably be quite safe.
But then she would have to buy a whole new PC, which wouldn’t be all that much easier to use for anything that mattered to her. All she wants is a well-connected typewriter.
I know this will draw furious letters from grandparents who delight in their computers. But they are, I believe, a minority.
And it seems a terrible shame to throw away perfectly good old computers just because they won’t run a modern version of Windows. What we need is a Granny Linux, something that is safe from both malice at one end of the modem cable and bafflement at the other.
I think I may have found it, in the form of Xubuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux that runs on small and old computers.
Malice is not a real problem. Linux has been pretty secure against hackers for years now. The trouble is that, until recently, it was just as secure against normal users.
Even now the only form of Unix that’s really sensible for untechnical people is Apple’s Mac OS X, and with a reasonable budget I wouldn’t hesitate to get a Mac mini as Granny’s internet appliance.
But an old machine, which would otherwise run Windows 98, costs essentially nothing, and is quite likely to run one of the Debian-type Linuxes.
The easiest of these to install is probably Ubuntu, but the common versions of it demand quite modern hardware.
The only one that will run, or even install, on 64MB of memory seems to be Xubuntu, which uses the XFCE desktop. It does not look much like Windows and, until recently, could not put icons on the desktop. Instead, they lived on a taskbar.
But that’s no disadvantage for a Granny Linux. After all, how many icons does a typewriter have?
A Granny computer will only be asked to do two things, so it should have at most three icons — one to read and write email, one to write letters and one to look at the web.
This is, in fact, 50% more icons than the ideal Granny desktop. That would only have two icons: one to read letters, and one to write them. Whether Granny printed or emailed the letters would be a later decision.
Perhaps you could set up a desktop like that with a Windows Vista machine; God knows I have tried, and failed, with a Mac, where I can’t get down below three icons, since the same program can’t be used to write email and letters. And by the time you have customised such a machine to its very simplest, you might just as well have installed Xubuntu and have done with it.
Nothing that comes ready to use is ready for the sort of users who don’t want a computer at all.
In any case, none of the possible solutions for a modern machine would work in 64MB of memory.
It’s a delicious paradox that Linux, which was for years the system for people who really enjoyed fiddling with their computers, should have developed to the point where it’s the best system for people who hate the bloody things. — Guardian Unlimited Â