Hehe, you might think that!

In actuality though, I’ve always been the one who had to sort the tech stuff. We got our first family PC when I was 10, and I was the one who knew the most about it. We got the Internet when I was 13, and I was the one who had the passwords, and had to set it all up. Then when we got broadband, the router was actually in my room lol.

So yeah, I’ve always been the Admin, and Dad has always been the one who needed a limited account to protect him from himself.

Yeah. When the cloud has more control over your own files than you do, that’s not a feature, it’s a problem.

I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.

Linux has problems, but I’m so glad I don’t have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he’d consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.

He didn’t even know about onedrive, just phoned me like “The Internet isn’t working, what’s wrong?” and of course onedrive is the last thing I’d have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.

Much nicer now his OS doesn’t do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.

Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:

Replay data is stored in RAM by default but there is an option to store it on disk instead.

Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.