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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 ad

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.

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.