Linux needs to grow. Stop telling people it’s ‘tech-y’ or acting like you’re more advanced for using it, you are scaring away people. Linux Mint can be used by a senile person perfectly.
Explain shortly the benefits, ‘faster, more secure, easier to use, main choices of professionals and free’. Ask questions that let you know if they need to dual boot, ‘do you use Adobe, anti-cheat games, or Microsoft Office’, ‘how new is your computer’, ‘do you use a Mac’.
And most importantly, offer to help them install.
They don’t understand the concept of distros, just suggest Linux Mint LTS Cinnamon unless they’re curious.
That’s it, spread Linux to as many people as possible. The larger the marketshare, the better support we ALL get. We can fight enshittification. Take the time to spread it but don’t force it on anyone.
AND STOP SCARING PEOPLE AWAY. Linux has no advertising money, it’s up to us.
Offer family members or friends your help or copy and paste the below
how to install linux: 1) copy down your windows product key 2) backup your files to a harddrive 3) install the linux mint cinnamon iso from the linux mint website 4) use etcher (download from its website) to put the iso on a usb flash drive 5) go into bios 6) boot from the usb 7) erase the storage and install 8) press update all in the update manager 9) celebrate. it takes 15 minutes.
edit: LET ME RE-STATE, DO NOT FORCE IT ON ANYONE.
and if someone is at the level of ignorance (not in a derogatory fashion) that they dont know what a file even is genuinely dont bother unless theyre your parents cause youll be tech support for their ‘how do i install the internet’ questions.
Stop being elitist.
Use linux mint.
Why linux mint?
It’s like ubuntu but no snaps.
What’s ubuntu?
It’s like debian but not as stable. You’ll get more recent apps in ubuntu, test them, and when they are tested companies use the apps in debian.
Ok, What are snaps?
You can install packages with snap, but it’s proprietary.
Ok, that’s bad?
Yes. Foss apps are great and better than proprietary garbage.
Ok, foss good, proprietary garbage.
Why debian and not fedora?
Because all apps are build for it.
So it’s like aur?
No. Aur is made by users for users. Builds on debian are mostly official.
So the package manager is better on debian?
Yes, kind of.
I heard of distrobox. I could use the package manager on any distro.
Yes, but it’s easier at the beginning to stick to one distro and package manager to get used to it.
Why not arch?
It’s too unstable.
Ok, no arch distro. I heard manjaro is good.
No, it holds back packages for no reason.
Ok. What about fedora?
It doesn’t have as many packages.
But it has the copr, aren’t there a lot of apps?
Yes, but it’s like aur, it’s build by users. Debian builds are good, stable and widely used.
Ok. What about nix? I heared it’s the new arch and there are even more packages.
Yes, but It’s not for newbies.
What is an immutable system? I heared that’s the next big thing.
It’s like android an image based operating system where you can’t brick your system by accident with rm -rf /
What’s rm -rf /?
Just test it in a terminal, it’s fun.
How can I play games?
You install steam.
Do I have to configure anything?
Hopefully not
Can I only use linux mint?
No you can use any distro, they are all linux. You can choose whatever you want. Just choose mint.
Why mint?
It has no snaps.
What do I use instead?
Flatpaks
If I use flatpaks, why does the package manager matter so much?
Because not all apps are available as flatpacks, especially command line tools. Snaps has cli but it’s proprietary.
Can’t I just use any distro and use a debian distrobox for those packages I need from debian?
Yes, use linux mint, it’s easy to use.
Do I actually need all those packages? I only use word and steam.
No, probably not.
Why not using ubuntu and install flatpaks?
Because ubuntu sucks.
But isn’t mint based on ubuntu?
Yes, but it has no snaps.
Can’t I just use debian?
Yes, but it doesn’t have the latest packages.
How do I install word?
You can’t. You can use the online version.
That’s a lot to understand. Can’t I just windows? I only open steam anyway.
Yes, but it’s proprietary.
Steam is also proprietary.
Yes, but you xan play games with it on linux.
But if steam is proprietary, and windows is proprietary, and I mainly use steam anyway, does it even matter?
What’s a DE?
Linux mint uses cinnamon, it’s cool!
I saw some KDE screemshots. It looks cool and everyone talks about it. There’s a big release coming in a few weeks. how do I install it?
You usually don’t mix DEs unless you know what you do.
I don’t.
Then don’t mix it.
But I want to use KDE. Which distro should I use? Kubuntu?
No, it uses snaps like ubuntu.
…
No it doesn’t. If you don’t care and just want anything that runs Steam, don’t bother. Just pick anything, it runs fine on most Linux distributions, Windows and probably Mac. You’re fine with tossing a coin. I’d choose Linux in that case since it’s cheaper.
A proper conversation would be like this:
What shall I use?
Depends… What do you want to do with your computer?
Play games with Steam.
Alright, then use XY. Wanna know more?
No.
Fine.
Thanks for the laugh 😀
Someone prefers mint.
How do I install word? https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=LH-6tp-KBuQ
I don’t buy the whole “the more users a software has, the better it gets” rhetoric. Historically this has been the opposite of the case. There’s an even higher users-to-contributors ratio amongst the general population. Not all users share the same respect for the philosophy behind FOSS.
If the driving force behind design decisions becomes “what keeps people happy so they’ll keep using our software” and not “freedom,” there’s now a practical incentive to sell out and introduce more Intellectual Property shenanigans into the ecosystem. After all, it’s a lot easier to hire devs and churn out new features and keep the software actively developed for the foreseeable future if there’s money in it. And the only way there can be money in it is if there are proprietary licenses shitting up the place, and Shit As A Service suscription models as far as the eye can see.
Linux always has been, and should always continue to be, about freedom. If that freedom comes with user-friendliness, great! If not, then we have to pay the price: taking responsibility for the tools and tech we use and learning how to use them properly and contributing to them to maintain a community of likeminded people. Otherwise, we’re not worthy of the freedom and the responsibilities it entails.
I get your point about elitism and gatekeeping. We’re no better than Windows users or Mac users or any other OS’ users. We just have a set of values unique to our community, and they have sets of values that differ. We also shouldn’t be throwing users under the bus in the name of politics, but part of what makes Linux slightly more bearable is the way the driving philosophy of Free Software is evident throughout. Linux is better than it could be because it attracts the people who want to be here for the community’s values, not the people who have to be coaxed and coerced into accepting the values to use the “best”/“easiest”/“friendliest” software.
OK I’m searching in vain for the mega-upvote button.
I would add that desktop Linux only exists today as an alternative to Windows because of those values. This history of Linux desktop environments and applications is rife with examples of popular or personally important bits of software that were forked and kept alive by the freedom granted by FLOSS licensing.
If “Linux” was a thing that MS could have bought and then destroyed or enshittified, they’d have done it twenty years ago. And make no mistake, they continue to play the long game.
Yes, we should all be good to newcomers. No, the direction of desktop Linux should not be steered by wanting more of them. It should be steered by a need to provide desktop Linux for people who enjoy using desktop Linux.
I wish Free Software, Free Society were mandatory reading…
It’s already dominant on the servers.
All I want is to be able to post a question in a forum and get an answer besides "Until you read these 3 texts and 20 MAN entries I don’t want you to even stain this forum’s pages with your ignorant drivel’.
I’ve been trying to go linux for 20 years now and every fuckdamn time a problem I cannot solve or find an answer for online leads to the above and I’m done.
You guys may have cleaned up your community now but I don’t have the energy or patience to try it again.
Full Disclosure: IT admin with 3 decades of experience including supporting linux servers. If I have a hard time with it, think about what your average ‘raised on a smartphone’ newbie is going to think.
casually mentions how i run linux. other person. that’s cool. continues with windows.
if they don’t want to hear it, they don’t want to hear it. but if they do, they know they can ask.
No. Make them use it. Force them. Hit them if you need to. Make sure they do an Arch install without any scripts and don’t help them
Look at them harshly thoughout the whole interaction and let them know they are less then us.
Stop doing this. Just be normal.
No, Linux (especially arch Linux) is the far superior operating system where the only limit is skill and knowledge.
Build an automatic Linux mint installer that can handle most typical configurations and migrate data and apps from windows (with wine)
Get some oldish windows exploits together.
Build a worm that replaced vulnerable windows systems with mint
???
Profit (3 free meals a day and TV for the rest of your life)
fucking genius
I don’t think anyone who isn’t already curious about Linux should install Linux. And I sure as hell am not going to try to convince anyone and be blamed for not being able to use adobe products.
I would make an exception for the type of people who only use their computer for the internet. People like my parents, who do about 98% of everything through a browser, and occasionally write a letter.
For someone like them, Linux is ideal. Just explain that Firefox is the internet and rename the office shortcuts, and they wouldn’t notice a difference.
thats a huge portion of people too
Irony: being elitist about the most egalitarian operating system
I’m a Linux user and fan for a lot of years now. Software engineer by profession.
It’s not ready for widespread adoption to the less tech-savvy masses.
It misses some functionality that is really hard to get right but is absolutely expected to get right. For example: graceful suspend and wakeups. It happens so often even to me that I close my Linux laptop for the day, next morning open it up to a bunch of warnings and error messages about Bluetooth adapters or whatever the device of the day that wants to malfunction is that prevents a sound S2 S3 sleep.
I don’t get freaked out about it. But grandma sure would. And yet my 10 year old MacBook Pro gets it right every single fucking time; completely flawlessly. This is the bar of usability that Linux has to achieve for widespread adoption as a true, polished, personal computing experience.
edit: meant S3 sleep.
It also doesn’t help that doing anything in Linux requires weird little guys like “mv” or “mkdir” or “chmod 777”
Stop being elitist about Linux, the amount of times I’ve had to explain that none of my software runs great on Linux just to have to hear how with trouble shooting it will. My work depends on the use of my software, it’s collaborative. If I have to trouble shoot every time adobe or Ableton updates it’s a bad use of my time and is actively taking time away from projects. Only I use VSTs for music production, they all work perfectly in windows and MacOS. Linux? Hit or miss.
Maybe I’m convinced. Now I gotta find the right one, set it up. Get all my software working, learn a new UI, hope that it doesn’t break collaboration. All in all, not worth the little I would save.
Your time is quite valuable, but there’s a reallllly good chance you’re underestimating the cost of your process in windows:
The OS is cheap. Even buying a key at full price, it’s like ~$100 ballpark. But the software you use costs money, and if it’s business grade, it’s an “As A Service” subscription plan. And any plugins (including VSTs) aren’t free if you want good quality ones. And support plans cost money. And upgrades cost money. And getting new hardware because the newest version of the OS doesn’t supoort anything older than 5 years costs money. And you still end up spending your valuable time on troubleshooting, whether it’s you or waiting on a tech to do it, because problems and errors still occur.
Seriously, keep a spreadsheet of how much time you spend on getting your programs and hardware to work the way you want, even if it’s the time you have to spend waiting for someone else to do the fixing for you. Your time is valuable, and you don’t deserve someone pulling the wool over your eyes to rent you something you should own.
I’m not saying Linux is a better fit for you, nor that you’re in the wrong for not wanting to hop on the hypetrain. Just that it’s not as cut and dry as it seems, the cost isn’t as low as you think, and the whole “Just Works” narrative in any tech is a myth.
The Adobe photography plan costs me $120 a year, and honestly includes more useful updates than not. Their AI masking upgrades the last couple years are saving me hours to days of editing time per photo session.
$120 a year is worth maybe one hour of my free time. Even just migrating to Darktable would take me weeks or months of dedicated time to migrate my existing catalog.
vsts work great with yabridge but yeah i get what you mean :D. theres a new plugin standard called clap so hopefullt that grows
People can make their own choices. I have 6-7 Linux machines, and asked my brother to install it too. He hated the experience. He bought a Mac at the end, and he’s very happy with it. Some people just don’t want Linux. They don’t care about its philosophy, or that it’s free. They want an ecosystem, and a status symbol.
I generally disagree with trying to get people to use linux now. Im seeing a lot of people leaving linux and getting turned off by the idea of it.
Aside from outliers like Android and Chrome OS, I do not think Linux is in a suitable state for non-techy people to use unfortunately. I’m really hoping PopOS will be able to change things in the future, however as it stands I really don’t think it is ready for prime time.
Users expect things that kind of just work and Linux Mint has not been that experience for me. I found the app store to be kind of annoying to use and complicated. The settings app were not very well laid out and miscellaneous stuff like that, which kind of ruins the experience.
Meanwhile, there are just general Linux issues to accessibility becoming worse and worse instead of better. You have issues like we still don’t have a distro with good wine integration so people can use the apps they actually need to use. The apps that we do have natively, are oftentimes relatively… janky. If you’re comparing Libreoffice to Microsoft Office, the experience is just not the same, even if the technical capability is.
EDIT: I want Linux to succeed just as much as anybody else. In fact, I think I might want it to succeed more because I absolutely detest maintaining Windows installs. However, lying about the state of Linux and being dishonest about it is not the way to go about this. We should be honest with all of its issues, so to speak. So that way we can strive to make them better instead of ignoring them and sweeping them under the rug for the people we tell to trial and to find instead.
If I might ask: Who is leaving and what for? Mac? I’ve seen some developers buy the newer M2/M3 Macbooks. I think they’re nice. But not nice enough to pay the price for one with a decent amount of RAM and storage myself.
I have had multiple friends I’ve gotten to try linux for a prolonged period of time leave back to windows or mac, (In one case ChromeOS). There are a variety of issues, needing to constantly wrangle to get games working even with lutris and steam, Various accessibility issues, Microsoft office as I mentioned etc.
the general consensus was “it often did most of what they needed it to do, but not all, and often times not well enough”
Uuh. Yeah I believe you. I can’t really empathize with that because on friday I booted the Windows on my laptop and it took like one and a half hours with the fan on maximum and two restarts until it had done the updates of the last three months since I’ve last used it. And then the Steam main window started flickering like crazy and I had to reboot it once or twice more, fix the boot order since it also messed with that and the graphics issues luckily went away on their own. I like to do development and dabble in electronics projects and that’s also so clumsy on windows. You need like 20 different tools to get a task done and windows doesn’t come with a single one of them. No git, no proper editor, nothing to mess with firmware files or flash them onto the microcontroller Not even the driver for some really standard USB/Serial chips. You can’t read some of the filesystems, it can only extract one or two types of archives and always something gets in your way and messes up your workflow… And speaking of workflows… I really like the unix philosophy, it’s soo convenient to use computers with a proper cli. In windows there is no equivalent to that, you’re supposed to use a plethora of UI tools, or nowadays use the WSL and just install Linux. And that’s just one aspect of what I do on my laptop. Guess it’s different for everyone of us. I mean I don’t judge. It’s just, I’ve tried both and I just can’t imagine how I’d enjoy using Windows. But everyone should make that decision for themselves. (Sorry for rambling on and on. I was really a bit pissed before the weekend. And turns out I still am. The “things have fewer issues on windows” somehow never works out for me.)
oh I absolute hate windows too, personally I can never stop running into issues with it. I have this really bloody stupid issue where every now and then my screen will flicker purple for no reason, AMD driver updates will constantly kick me out of my games with the stupid console open but blank. and so many other idiotic issues. It’s weird, it’s a;most as if the second you become technologically inclined windows intentionally breaks itself xD
Hmmh. Something is going on here.
Third best enterprise OS.
Well, it’s better than Windows, so besides Linux what is better than macOS?
Not in an enterprise setting, so patato potato
Depends on the enterprise.
Is $1900 too much for a blazing fast laptop with 1TB/24GB that will have support for 10 years?
I’m sorry, I really don’t get all the innuendo here. Are we talking about a Macbook or another laptop here that gets support for 10 years? I like to pay about 1200€ for a laptop and it usually lasts me like 6-8 years. But 1 TB SSD is a bit short of what I’m comfortable with. If I configure a M3 Macbook with 24GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD it comes down to 3149€. That is about $3.400 after taxes. Another laptop I really like is the frame.work laptop. The AMD Ryzen 7 should be plenty fast. The price including 32GB of memory and 2 TB of storage is 1918€ or about $2.070 after taxes. And in the years to come you can fix it and upgrade it however you like. So your $1900 sounds about right if it’s blazing fast and lasts you 10 years. I just wonder which laptop you’re talking about.
It’s a 15” MacBook Air M2. The closest frame.work laptop I could configure was $5 off from what you said, so I think we are going for the same specs.
I love the framework system. If I was going PC that’s absolutely who I’d go with. All those swappable ports?! I’m drooling.
All of my Apple laptops last a long time. I’m still using my 13” 2013 MacBook Air when I go on vacation. It’s so light and small. I’ve had to replace the battery on it, but I think that’s to be expected.
Fair enough. Yeah, the framework is a gem. And I learned about the M2 and M3 Macbooks because some people do AI / machine learning stuff on them and they seem to perform exceptionally well. I don’t think I’m a Mac guy, I’d probably need Linux to achieve happiness. I haven’t kept up but last time I checked M2 support was coming along.
Anyhow, my last two laptops were Thinkpads. They were both good machines, suffered quite some abuse and are still running. The old one is pretty damaged though, display hinges broken and some obvious damage, fan does everything but what it’s supposed to do. But it served me well for god knows how long. I think I went through 3 or 4 batteries until I finally replaced that one. The one after that also refuses to die. But it’s getting old and slow and I’m not willing to spend the money to upgrade the RAM and also buy a new battery. It didn’t last me as long as the one before. I’m just not in love with their current lineup. Next laptop isn’t going to be another Thinkpad. Maybe I’ll go for a Framework.
This, don’t get why people are so set on convincing the world to switch.
Userbase is big enough that support is pretty good, we’ve all got what we want out of it, why try to push it on people who don’t care about technology
Personally, I want everyone to switch. I help my family all the time with their computing needs. I myself would greatly prefer them running linux all the time, but needs are needs.
But please don’t give unsolicited advice about Linux. No one wants that.
thats where the ‘dont force it on anyone’ comes from
Headline: “Person new to and overly excited about Thing, starts telling other more experienced people about how to approach and think about Thing”
:(
This is the attitude the OP is talking about.
Being snobbish helps noone, we’ve all been noobs at some point.
Linux is the most widely deployed OS on the planet. I’m not sure OP is actually talking about aside from desktop usage. It’s in your headphones, home appliances, routers, competing OS’s, datacenters that run the world…what do you imagine is missed?
Ill be honest I don’t feel any need or desire to actively crusade for Linux or spread it. Microsoft will keep making windows worse, many users will eventually reach a breaking point. Just be there to support the people seeking a better path, easier than trying to convince disinterested people into throwing out their tools.
