My mom (I don’t want to reveal her exact deets, but she’s around 60 y/o), whose only computer is a Chromebook, recently decided to stop using Snapfish to store her photos- no problem, I can download her photos off of Snapfish and put them on a USB drive for her since I have a bunch of unused ones. She asked me how she could upload photos straight from her cellphone and put them onto the USB drive, so I started to show her how she could do so on any other OS, until I found out that you can’t move files from a cellphone on Chrome!
I told her she could borrow my brother’s laptop since his has Windows installed (my laptop is older and unfortunately just croaked on me), but she knows he won’t be here to have a computer to borrow forever (once again not looking to reveal anyone’s exact age, but he’s in his early 20’s) and neither will I, so she wants to learn how to do the photo transfers herself. I tried to suggest the idea of using cloud storage for the transfer i.e. putting the photos into a cloud storage service on her phone, accessing said service on her Chromebook, and downloading the files off the storage service and onto the USB drive, but she seemed kinda overwhelmed and confused by the whole idea, with the whole device-switching, downloading-new-apps kinda thing.
I was wondering if there was an operating system I could install for her on her Chromebook that she could easily adapt to while being able to transfer photos off her phone via USB? At least something I could try dual-booting for her at first just to see if it’s something she would enjoy using. The drag-and-drop process for photo transfer just seems to be easier for her to understand, and I don’t think an operating system switch will be too jarring given that she uses Windows for work, just as long as it’s something she can just log on and use. I know what distros tend to be easier to use for beginners, but I don’t know how well they’ll run on her Chromebook.
The board name for the computer is BLUEBIRD, and the device itself is about three years old. She doesn’t use it for much of anything besides internet browsing. She uses it maybe a couple times a month at the most.
(P.S. Before anyone asks about just installing Windows for her, I know Windows can be a little bit harder to get working on a Chromebook than Linux, and I don’t want her to run into any issues that I don’t know how to handle.)