4 ms·

This is an extremely difficult proposition, especially given the fact that most people don't know what an operating system even is. If I influence someone to sw

by Udo 11y ago

This is an extremely difficult proposition, especially given the fact that most people don't know what an operating system even is. If I influence someone to switch from Windows to desktop Linux, I will be the person responsible for their acclimatization and I will have to do the support as well. There's also a question about long-term usability. They won't be able to install the same apps their friends are using. In many cases, there won't even be a viable equivalent to a given Windows app, at least not for non-techies. Some Linux updates will break key components, such as the display driver, and it will be very difficult and frustrating to fix (if not impossible). The assertion that they are free won't mean much to these users, and over time they will resent me for suggesting the OS switch - just before they return to Windows, install their favorite game and their favorite crapware chat client, and breathe a sigh of relief. Even as an open source advocate (where I can!) I have to accept that my motivations and use cases are drastically different from 99% of the population. If someone has a solution to this, I'd be eager to hear it.

seansmccullough 11y ago
I agree, I already have to provide friends & family with enough tech support already. I'm just happy I've convinced my parents to switch from Internet Explorer and XP.
simonblack 11y ago
Don't. There is an old piece of Heinlein advice: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig." I used to be a rabid Linux advocate. Now I do two things; one is I don't help Windows people fix their computers "Sorry, I don't use Windows. I don't know anything about it." and the other is to always let the Windows user ask first. If they don't ask, I don't do anything.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  I think you are generally right here, and it's obviously up to the individual person, but you can do various things to make yourself more available to interested people. My friend once had an idea when the two of us were more interested in free software advocacy. He put a big "GNU/Linux" sticker on his laptop and ran a fairly flashy setup of Compiz (the flashiest thing around at the time). Then he just went to bars and cafes to chill out and hack. Interested people would often ask him what his computer was because it was obviously different than anything else they had seen. At that point it was fairly easy to see if the person had any interest in software freedom. I seem to remember he used to carry around those Ubuntu CDs that Canonical gave out for this purpose as well. At worst he would give them a CD and say, "Give it a shot. You may like it or not." The thing is that quite a few people, even if they aren't technical, have an interest in software freedom once they know what it is. Many of the people who approached him did so because they were frustrated by companies dictating what they could and could not do with their computers. They were looking for choices. The killer feature to demonstrate was the package manager of all things. Of course choice comes at a cost. It was important to stress to people that the cost of using the choice was spending time learning and fiddling. The people who approached my friend were often the type of people who were quite happy with this trade-off. Later, when I worked in a high school in Japan teaching English, I used to hang out late at night hacking on my computer (I had no heat/cooling in my apartment so the school was the best place to hack :-) ). Many of the other teachers would see me working on my laptop and ask me about it. GNU/Linux is practically unknown to the mainstream in Japan as far as I can tell, so it was always an interesting conversation. After the school board dictated a change from MS office to Open Office (which I had been using throughout anyway), several of the teachers installed Ubuntu on their personal machines. To be honest, for the kinds of things they did, it just worked better. I think that this kind of passive advocacy is probably going to be the most effective. I think many people here would be surprised at the level of resonance that free software has with normal people on the street (once they understand what it is). But it is best to narrow your target to those people who are interested unless you just want to hear endless stories of "I tried Linux and it didn't work LOL".
- bigger_cheese 11y ago
  I think it very much depends on the use case. My Dad wanted to get a new PC. Since my parents are both semi retired I was very curious why he thought he needed a new PC. It turns out he just wanted something he could casually surf the web on and my mother could use to check her email. I had an old laptop sitting at home, which had Ubuntu on it. I gave it to him as an experiment and told him if he didn't like it to go ahead and buy a new pc. He has been using it for about 18 months now. I'm about due to buy myself a new laptop so I'll probably shunt my current one over to them then. My mother is a teacher and she uses Macs in her classroom so she was already receptive to non Windows options which probably helped. I'd say Linux is certainly a viable option if you're like my parents i.e. In the 60+ age bracket and don't need to play games, don't need to run applications but do want something you can use to email grandchildren and surf net on. The most complex apps my parents use are Firefox and LibreOffice.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
Yes, this is a huge problem. The fact is that most computer users treat the OS as an immutable fact about the device, much like the firmware on a cable settop box or digital watch. Just introducing the concept of an operating system as an independent piece of software is a challenge, let alone explaining the benefits of switching to a different operating system. Of course, that's not even getting into issues like Office compatibility. I have a very non-technical older friend who could easily do everything he needs with Linux and LibreOffice, but he has mountains of old Office files dating back anywhere from Office 2003 all the way back to DOS versions of Office and all of them have multiple rendering issues when opened in LibreOffice (we tried). Running MS Office in WINE isn't an option either, as it's brittle, technical, and confusing. Major strides in user education and compatibility will be necessary before Linux distributions have even a shadow of a chance of picking up significant desktop marketshare.
davnicwil 11y ago
> The assertion that they are free won't mean much to these users Yes! Running a linux distro is NOT free. It's only free under the assumption that your time is worthless, which is true for precisely nobody. The true cost is a function of how valuable your time is vs the fixed cost of windows / buying a mac, assuming a relatively small constant setup time cost for both of these. This makes linux desktop distros, with their typically long and painful setup process, actually more expensive than Windows / OSX for basically everyone. The only case where it becomes worth it is when there's a return on your investment of that large initial cost, i.e. you'll either be taking advantage of linux a lot professionally or you just find playing with it very intellectually rewarding. Ergo, linux only appeals to engineers, academics and hackers. There's no solution to this per-se, it is what it is. Just a result of the economics of the current setup.
- reedlaw 11y ago
  I don't find this to be true in practice. Mac problems turn out to be extremely difficult if not impossible to solve. Your main recourse, if you don't live near Apple "Geniuses", is the support forums where the signal to noise ratio is very low. Problems that are a breeze to solve in Linux are a nightmare in OSX because all you have to go by are big shiny icons. With Linux you can look at log files, enable verbose output, or often even get help from the engineers who designed the software. It's true there is a steep learning curve in Linux. But the absence of a learning curve on OSX gives users a false sense of security that leaves them with nowhere to turn when problems arise.
  - davnicwil 11y ago
    That's a very good point - the flip side of the same coin I guess, if you don't invest in understanding your OS at all, then when you hit a snag you're really in trouble. But, I still stand by the assertion that this doesn't really make a difference for most users. I mean, if you're talking about novice users, the ability to check logs, and talk to engineers is pretty useless anyway. The fact you can do this stuff is an advantage only if you're a pretty advanced user in the first place, and know enough to use that information to solve a problem.
reedlaw 11y ago
I thought the same way until people came to me with virus-ridden Windows computers and I helped install Linux for them. They never had a problem and they never came back to me for help. They even thanked me for introducing them to Linux. These were not technical people. They were middle-aged and mainly used their computers for checking email or occasionally using office productivity software. At the time I was using Ubuntu so that's what I gave them. Now I use Arch Linux and I'm not as willing to introduce Ubuntu. Arch requires more patience than Ubuntu so I only introduce it to people like my wife whom I can help regularly. So while I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Linux over Windows, I regret that there's not a more beginner-friendly distro. Ubuntu is broken in my opinion. Partly it's due to its success. There are too many beginners using it and if you search the web for answers you get lots of cargo-cult advice and copy/paste solutions. Arch Linux has the best documentation[1] I've seen, not just for it's own parts, but for tons of Linux-related software. It's technical but concise. It helps you gain understanding instead of simply grabbing an easy solution. Macs are the polar opposite. Everything is "easy" but it'll cost you $30 to buy an app to fix your mouse and you gain no useful knowledge through the experience. 1. http://wiki.archlinux.org/ http://wiki.archlinux.org/
- Udo 11y ago
  This sounds very alien to me. Only one of the factors I listed could possibly be fixed by choosing the right distro, so I must attribute the rest of your success story to extreme culture differences. Don't get me wrong: it's nice to hear this is working for you, but that outcome is nowhere near a realistic expectation where I live. > Everything is "easy" but it'll cost you $30 to buy an app to fix your mouse and you gain no useful knowledge through the experience. While I don't think paying for software is necessarily a deal breaker, I have never come across a situation where buying an app for $30 was necessary to "fix the mouse". What was wrong with it? I agree that just using an external tool doesn't give you knowledge, but strictly speaking, fiddling with an arbitrarily designed config file doesn't grant you any meaningful knowledge either beyond the single program it was intended to run on. For example, I would rate the knowledge of how to edit an X11 config manually as functionally equivalent to knowing how to install a GUI tool that manages your display.
  - 11y ago
ramgorur 11y ago
I do not completely agree, couple of my lab-mates (doing PhD in CS/ECE) still stuck at windows, they know what an OS is but they do not seem to care that "doing ssh to connect to one of the school servers is a basic human right" -- they search the web to download a software to do that, very sad. Moreover, I know one postdoc (CS major) who uses a mac but never did "ps -u <username>" on a terminal.

by Udo 11y ago

seansmccullough 11y ago

I agree, I already have to provide friends & family with enough tech support already. I'm just happy I've convinced my parents to switch from Internet Explorer and XP.

simonblack 11y ago

Don't. There is an old piece of Heinlein advice: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It only wastes your time and annoys the pig." I used to be a rabid Linux advocate. Now I do two things; one is I don't help Windows people fix their computers "Sorry, I don't use Windows. I don't know anything about it." and the other is to always let the Windows user ask first. If they don't ask, I don't do anything.

mikekchar 11y ago
I think you are generally right here, and it's obviously up to the individual person, but you can do various things to make yourself more available to interested people. My friend once had an idea when the two of us were more interested in free software advocacy. He put a big "GNU/Linux" sticker on his laptop and ran a fairly flashy setup of Compiz (the flashiest thing around at the time). Then he just went to bars and cafes to chill out and hack. Interested people would often ask him what his computer was because it was obviously different than anything else they had seen. At that point it was fairly easy to see if the person had any interest in software freedom. I seem to remember he used to carry around those Ubuntu CDs that Canonical gave out for this purpose as well. At worst he would give them a CD and say, "Give it a shot. You may like it or not." The thing is that quite a few people, even if they aren't technical, have an interest in software freedom once they know what it is. Many of the people who approached him did so because they were frustrated by companies dictating what they could and could not do with their computers. They were looking for choices. The killer feature to demonstrate was the package manager of all things. Of course choice comes at a cost. It was important to stress to people that the cost of using the choice was spending time learning and fiddling. The people who approached my friend were often the type of people who were quite happy with this trade-off. Later, when I worked in a high school in Japan teaching English, I used to hang out late at night hacking on my computer (I had no heat/cooling in my apartment so the school was the best place to hack :-) ). Many of the other teachers would see me working on my laptop and ask me about it. GNU/Linux is practically unknown to the mainstream in Japan as far as I can tell, so it was always an interesting conversation. After the school board dictated a change from MS office to Open Office (which I had been using throughout anyway), several of the teachers installed Ubuntu on their personal machines. To be honest, for the kinds of things they did, it just worked better. I think that this kind of passive advocacy is probably going to be the most effective. I think many people here would be surprised at the level of resonance that free software has with normal people on the street (once they understand what it is). But it is best to narrow your target to those people who are interested unless you just want to hear endless stories of "I tried Linux and it didn't work LOL".
bigger_cheese 11y ago
I think it very much depends on the use case. My Dad wanted to get a new PC. Since my parents are both semi retired I was very curious why he thought he needed a new PC. It turns out he just wanted something he could casually surf the web on and my mother could use to check her email. I had an old laptop sitting at home, which had Ubuntu on it. I gave it to him as an experiment and told him if he didn't like it to go ahead and buy a new pc. He has been using it for about 18 months now. I'm about due to buy myself a new laptop so I'll probably shunt my current one over to them then. My mother is a teacher and she uses Macs in her classroom so she was already receptive to non Windows options which probably helped. I'd say Linux is certainly a viable option if you're like my parents i.e. In the 60+ age bracket and don't need to play games, don't need to run applications but do want something you can use to email grandchildren and surf net on. The most complex apps my parents use are Firefox and LibreOffice.

kitsunesoba 11y ago

Yes, this is a huge problem. The fact is that most computer users treat the OS as an immutable fact about the device, much like the firmware on a cable settop box or digital watch. Just introducing the concept of an operating system as an independent piece of software is a challenge, let alone explaining the benefits of switching to a different operating system. Of course, that's not even getting into issues like Office compatibility. I have a very non-technical older friend who could easily do everything he needs with Linux and LibreOffice, but he has mountains of old Office files dating back anywhere from Office 2003 all the way back to DOS versions of Office and all of them have multiple rendering issues when opened in LibreOffice (we tried). Running MS Office in WINE isn't an option either, as it's brittle, technical, and confusing. Major strides in user education and compatibility will be necessary before Linux distributions have even a shadow of a chance of picking up significant desktop marketshare.

davnicwil 11y ago

> The assertion that they are free won't mean much to these users Yes! Running a linux distro is NOT free. It's only free under the assumption that your time is worthless, which is true for precisely nobody. The true cost is a function of how valuable your time is vs the fixed cost of windows / buying a mac, assuming a relatively small constant setup time cost for both of these. This makes linux desktop distros, with their typically long and painful setup process, actually more expensive than Windows / OSX for basically everyone. The only case where it becomes worth it is when there's a return on your investment of that large initial cost, i.e. you'll either be taking advantage of linux a lot professionally or you just find playing with it very intellectually rewarding. Ergo, linux only appeals to engineers, academics and hackers. There's no solution to this per-se, it is what it is. Just a result of the economics of the current setup.

reedlaw 11y ago
I don't find this to be true in practice. Mac problems turn out to be extremely difficult if not impossible to solve. Your main recourse, if you don't live near Apple "Geniuses", is the support forums where the signal to noise ratio is very low. Problems that are a breeze to solve in Linux are a nightmare in OSX because all you have to go by are big shiny icons. With Linux you can look at log files, enable verbose output, or often even get help from the engineers who designed the software. It's true there is a steep learning curve in Linux. But the absence of a learning curve on OSX gives users a false sense of security that leaves them with nowhere to turn when problems arise.
- davnicwil 11y ago
  That's a very good point - the flip side of the same coin I guess, if you don't invest in understanding your OS at all, then when you hit a snag you're really in trouble. But, I still stand by the assertion that this doesn't really make a difference for most users. I mean, if you're talking about novice users, the ability to check logs, and talk to engineers is pretty useless anyway. The fact you can do this stuff is an advantage only if you're a pretty advanced user in the first place, and know enough to use that information to solve a problem.

reedlaw 11y ago

I thought the same way until people came to me with virus-ridden Windows computers and I helped install Linux for them. They never had a problem and they never came back to me for help. They even thanked me for introducing them to Linux. These were not technical people. They were middle-aged and mainly used their computers for checking email or occasionally using office productivity software. At the time I was using Ubuntu so that's what I gave them. Now I use Arch Linux and I'm not as willing to introduce Ubuntu. Arch requires more patience than Ubuntu so I only introduce it to people like my wife whom I can help regularly. So while I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Linux over Windows, I regret that there's not a more beginner-friendly distro. Ubuntu is broken in my opinion. Partly it's due to its success. There are too many beginners using it and if you search the web for answers you get lots of cargo-cult advice and copy/paste solutions. Arch Linux has the best documentation[1] I've seen, not just for it's own parts, but for tons of Linux-related software. It's technical but concise. It helps you gain understanding instead of simply grabbing an easy solution. Macs are the polar opposite. Everything is "easy" but it'll cost you $30 to buy an app to fix your mouse and you gain no useful knowledge through the experience. 1. http://wiki.archlinux.org/ http://wiki.archlinux.org/

Udo 11y ago
This sounds very alien to me. Only one of the factors I listed could possibly be fixed by choosing the right distro, so I must attribute the rest of your success story to extreme culture differences. Don't get me wrong: it's nice to hear this is working for you, but that outcome is nowhere near a realistic expectation where I live. > Everything is "easy" but it'll cost you $30 to buy an app to fix your mouse and you gain no useful knowledge through the experience. While I don't think paying for software is necessarily a deal breaker, I have never come across a situation where buying an app for $30 was necessary to "fix the mouse". What was wrong with it? I agree that just using an external tool doesn't give you knowledge, but strictly speaking, fiddling with an arbitrarily designed config file doesn't grant you any meaningful knowledge either beyond the single program it was intended to run on. For example, I would rate the knowledge of how to edit an X11 config manually as functionally equivalent to knowing how to install a GUI tool that manages your display.
- 11y ago

ramgorur 11y ago

I do not completely agree, couple of my lab-mates (doing PhD in CS/ECE) still stuck at windows, they know what an OS is but they do not seem to care that "doing ssh to connect to one of the school servers is a basic human right" -- they search the web to download a software to do that, very sad. Moreover, I know one postdoc (CS major) who uses a mac but never did "ps -u <username>" on a terminal.