
Help a friend skip Windows 10 and try GNU/Linux - lelf
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/help-a-friend-skip-windows-10-and-try-gnu-linux
======
Udo
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.

~~~
simonblack
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
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".

------
svckr
Actually, I think Microsoft is getting _a lot_ of things right recently. This
may be my naive mind getting caught up in their clever PR moves but seriously,
I would give their stuff a shot if it wasn't so hard to adjust (1) after ten
years without Windows in my house.

I still remember the whole Internet Explorer bundling antitrust debacle and,
while it took about a decade, I believe this is a different Microsoft we're
having now. I'm not suggesting they learned something from that from a moral
point of view. Better. Consumers are increasingly hostile to monopolizing
companies and "extremist" movements like the FSF have their fair share in
raising awareness. Microsoft is probably just moving into the openness
direction because they have to if they want to keep their customers' business.
So, to put an end to my rambling: I can't support the kind of freedom the FSF
stands for, but I have to give them credit for (in a small part) forming the
public opinion.

(1) tiny footnote: I was about to call their products shitty, but I guess
"It's not you, it's me". Stuff just feels absolutely foreign to me :(

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Microsoft are becoming more "open" because, like many other companies, they're
shifting into a service business where much of the software has been
commodified, with the actual product being the monolith platform you rent
computing resources and tasks from. As such, there is no necessity to foist
any preferences, provided they're running on their (ultimately proprietary)
server farm. No copyleft unless there's a linking exception, obviously.

I've seen little that would convince me to actually move back to Windows as an
OS. All of the privacy SNAFUs that are leaking out do not inspire confidence.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I support this cause, but perhaps not spearheaded by the FSF. Their support
materials and such promote strictly free distributions, which has a severe
usability penalty and are not a great choice for people new to Linux.

~~~
olympus
Excellent point. The FSF can't really recommend anything but strictly free
distros and laptops. If they did they'd be compromising their principles as an
organization. But the recommendations leave a person wanting. Only one brand
has the "respect your freedom" certification so there isn't much choice in
buying a laptop. Someone who wants to promote freedom and still get a decent
distro with a reasonable size user base isn't going to be satisfied with what
the FSF is endorsing.

The heavyweights in the Linux world (Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, RedHat, etc.)
aren't recommended by the FSF because they have all compromised their strictly
free principles in favor of some practical usability. I want to be able to
play .mp3 files. I want to be able to play DVD's legally.

I* want a list of distros that aren't Windows or OS X and make sense for me to
actually use. They don't have to be strictly free, but they do have to be a
step in the right direction

*Okay, not really me, for someone who is new to Linux. DistroWatch is great, but I'll bet most people will end up disappointed if they chose a distro strictly off of popularity.

------
beeboop
Downloaded 15.04 today, put it on a USB drive, and tried to use the live
version on both my laptop and desktop. It failed to boot to the desktop
(showed Ubuntu loading screen though) on both with cryptic error messages and
30 minutes of Googling resulted in nothing that was helpful. I guess I'll do
my ritual of trying and giving up again in another couple years. This is
probably the 5th time I've tried installing Ubuntu. This is actually the worst
time of the 5, in other instances I usually at least got it to the desktop but
then ran into bugs that prevented decent usability and was never able to fix
them after many many hours of trying to do so.

~~~
unknownknowns
Completely agreed. And then when you _do_ get it installed, you end up having
random issues here and there (in my experience with using different distros of
Linux on the desktop).

For me, I just want an OS that works so that I can do work and not have to
fiddle with debugging a weird issue happening or setting up things that should
just be working out of the box.

I'll stick with Windows 10 and OS X which both satisfy the above :-)

------
ethana
Is there a guide to help a friend skip iOS and Android too? Because phones are
incredibly more personal than an old boring productive device like a PC.
People are walking around with a microphone and camera on them all day.

------
sanoli
Look, it is over and will probably never change (I'm talking about in our
lifetime): Linux is for geeks and hackers and it is frustrating for someone
who isn't one. 'Bout 9 years ago I installed it for the last time on someone's
computer. She plugged an external drive into it and then asked me where it
was. I told her she had to mount it before, and that was it, I saw how stupid
that was to someone used to having a drive just show up, when what they wanted
_exactly_ was to have the drive show up. Never installed linux on anyone's
computer anymore.

~~~
fallat
I've installed Elementary and Ubuntu on several older people's machines. They
loved it.

~~~
foiboitoi
Yeah I don't know what that guy's talking about. My parents and a few friends
love Ubuntu (some Debian). Granted they mostly just use Internet Browsers and
other basics. I think Linux would work perfectly for around 80 to 90% of
current Windows users.

~~~
sanoli
Well, I'm talking about what happened 9 years ago. Maybe things have changed,
though it doesn't seem like it from the other comments on this thread.

------
code_sterling
When I'm in the terminal, there is no better OS on Earth for writing code than
Linux. I delight in it, I consider myself fortunate to be able to so as a
living. However, when I'm done for the day and don't have any itch to hack on
something, I would rather be in any other operating system than Linux.

I think FOSS is great, but I also don't have any issue paying for something
that provides a better experience. Getting paid to make software is how I eat.
Regardless, getting a friend to skip Windows 10 is a dick move, as they could
miss the free upgrade window unsure of how to restore Windows before the free
upgrade window closes. VirtualBox is a pretty good way to introduce someone to
Linux without being a dick about it.

------
robgibbons
The number of naysayers here is saddening, if not surprising. At the risk of
sounding like RMS, you simply cannot say in the same breath that you honestly
value the FSF and then go onto declare that you still buy into Windows.

Although many of you use GNU/Linux daily, it seems that most have failed to
truly understand the value, the very significant importance, that the GNU
project and the FSF represent in our world.

In fact, if more people actually internalized what computing freedom means,
and what the technology landscape could one day look like, then GNU/Hurd would
already be finished, it would look like Windows 10, and there would be far
fewer proprietary software apologists on Hacker News, dismissing this post.

~~~
Delmania
>The number of naysayers here is saddening, if not surprising. At the risk of
sounding like RMS, you simply cannot say in the same breath that you honestly
value the FSF and then go onto declare that you still buy into Windows.

Only a Sith speaks in absolutes. Very few people can, or want to live like RMS
and never compromise on their beliefs. Most of us have responsibilities or
hobbies that require us to manage our time. The negativity is a reflection
that Linux works great until it doesn't. An update disables your network card,
your GPU doesn't fully run under linux, an update to GCC removes your ability
to update a port. At some point, people get tired of having to fix things and
just want the OS to work out of the box. That being said, there are plenty of
free software projects that do work well on Windows, such as Emacs and
Firefox.

>Although many of you use GNU/Linux daily, it seems that most have failed to
truly understand the value, the very significant importance, that the GNU
project and the FSF represent in our world.

It's Linux, not GNU/Linux; only RMS calls it that because he's a poor
marketer. Speaking of which, the FSF does not realize the value it brings to
people. It's not free software. The trend for most people is they simply do
not care, because the FSF is terrible at marketing. If people do not respond
to your campaign, it's not valuable. The value of the FSF is not in freedom,
it's in protecting people's choice. It's in ensuring that there are alternate
products, such as Linux, Emacs, Firefox, etc that people can use if they want
to avoid the consequences of using proprietary software.

>In fact, if more people actually internalized what computing freedom means,
and what the technology landscape could one day look like, then GNU/Hurd would
already be finished, it would look like Windows 10, and there would be far
fewer proprietary software apologists on Hacker News, dismissing this post.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The Hurd project is a (poorly managed) volunteer effort, and is suffering the
usual fate. The issue is not with supply, there are plenty of well qualified
people who could focus on Hurd and get it done, but they won't because it's
not worth their time. Trying to incentivize people with freedom only goes so
far. At some point, the hierarchy of needs changes, and people don't want spin
their wheels on something that offers them no tangible benefit. The FSF would
do well to understand why the linux kernel. won.

~~~
robgibbons
No. It is called GNU/Linux. Linux is the kernel, not the operating system. You
can believe that only RMS calls it this, but you're lying if you go around
telling other people.

And "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes" is itself an absolute statement.

~~~
Delmania
> No. It is called GNU/Linux. Linux is the kernel, not the operating system.
> You can believe that only RMS calls it this, but you're lying if you go
> around telling other people.

I enjoy it when people feel the need to educate me on things I know. However,
insisting on it being called "Gnu/Linux" is being pedantic; to the vast
majority of the world, it's Linux. If you go around calling it GNU/Linux, and
trying to educate people on the why it's called that, you're going to lose a
lot of people because you're missing the forest (a free operating system) for
the trees (the individual components.) The FSF suffers from poor marketing.
Your mission would be better served by people who understand how to get people
to care rather than pointless nitpicking of facts.

>And "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes" is itself an absolute statement.

The actual quote is "deals in absolutes". For good understanding of why this
is not a contradiction, read this:
[https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228110259A...](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228110259AAn3ebo)

------
rndmize
Forget it. I do too much tech support already. The kind of people that should
consider switching to linux are the ones that can figure it out themselves.

------
ankursanghi
Both softwares have their own place in the huge spectrum of users, needs and
purposes we have with the computers. Favoring one over the other simply shows
the narrow-minded approach. Linux is great in so many ways and still is the
backbone of most servers serving The Internet. Microsoft's Windows platform
was built and marketed as a productivity software and from the very beginning
(think inception of UI based interface) attempted to abstract the gory details
that make computers work. For those of us with a degree in computer science
and can speak (so-to-speak) in C, we are happy to see through the registers,
loops and logic, and for the rest of the humanity, it just looks like the
screen from The Matrix. As far as trying to move towards one vs the other, my
opinion is that it purely depends on what the user's short term and long term
motivations are. Just my 2 cents...

------
istvan__
It like help a friend move from a Ferrari to a tractor that was put together
10 different vendors. I friend who is a mechanical engineer with 10 years
experience in building cars might like it but my peers who's technological
knowledge is limited would like to use a product that was put together by a
professional product team. This is why I gave up trying to move my friends to
Linux, it is simply not as well integrated as MacOS or Windows. They get
several problems that they cannot solve alone and I much rather help them on
where to change something in Windows or MacOS than in Linux. Again, I am a
senior systems engineer with 18 years of experience using Linux and other unix
clones, including using them as desktop.

------
valdiorn
Cool. So I can use Linux to play The Sims 3 and work on my macro-filled Excel
file from work?

There's usually a reason why people have stuck to Windows or Mac, it suits
their needs and it's familiar. And besides that point, I'm a professional
software developer, I work with Linux servers all day, and I would never, ever
think of running it as my personal desktop OS. There are just too many
features/programs missing for it to be useful for me.

...it's great for running my service stack, though.

------
InclinedPlane
Help them even more by trying GNU/HURD.

~~~
chc
I don't quite follow. How does this help them more? Isn't that a less
supported and less well tested system? What value does it add over Linux for
the average user?

------
DKnoll

      SELECT CONCAT (YEAR(GETDATE()),' is the year of linux on the desktop!');

~~~
DKnoll
As a Linux user myself I guess I'll have to explain... I have been hearing
this since I was a child screwing around with Knoppix in the early 00s (this
will sound really impressive in about 20 years but at least one person reading
this is rolling their eyes because they were discussing Linux on comp.os.minix
in 1991).

End users do not care about the things you care about, especially if you is
the FSF. You will need to sell users on something more than a vague notion of
'freedom' if you would like them to buy into OSS.

The Linux desktop has come a long way but it still comes nowhere near the ease
of use and universality of Windows as a workstation OS. To the user, Windows
is just a vehicle for Microsoft Office. Try using LibreOffice in an actual
office environment, sharing documents with MS Office users and then tell me
how ready Linux is for the desktop.

~~~
mikekchar
As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share
documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible thing.

The main problem is that the file format relies on the behaviour of the Word
formatter to work in a particular way. If you wrote a word processor and
decided for yourself how it should format, then there is virtually no way you
can figure out from the contents of a doc or docx file exactly how it should
be formatted (and conversely no way to take what you have rendered and write a
doc or docx file that will render it the same way). The _only_ way to do it
would be to write a complete clone of the Word formatter, which is essentially
impossible because if you look at the docx spec you will realize that even MS
don't know how it works.

Of course, this is a technical issue that compounds a political problem -- MS
enjoy a monopoly on office products and those office products happen to be
essentially impossible to clone because they are ancient, idiosyncratic,
legacy monsters. The only way to fix the problem is to get people to stop
using those legacy apps --- which is pretty much unlikely.

Linux is more than ready for the desktop. It is unlikely ever to interoperate
seemlessly with MS Office, though. Still, the office in which I work has
switched completely to Chrome OS and Google apps. The school I worked in
before that has switched to Open Office and actually forbids the use of MS
Office (because of interoperability issues). Who knows...

~~~
DKnoll
I understand that Microsoft does not make Office very interoperable, but
whatever the reason for that is, anything but a basic document tends to get
garbled formatting. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I took friends to include
the non-technical who would be set back by this.. definitely if they send out
resumes looking like a madman who's never used a word processor.

The Canadian government and the vast majority of businesses I know of use
Office, so that would also be a hindrance.

Sorry for the pragmatism.. I also probably shouldn't have written the query
for MSSQL...

~~~
mikekchar
It's not entirely true. Word import and export is not perfect, but it's
relatively good in Libre Office. You don't have to use Linux to verify that
claim. There will be some sticking points, though:

\- Round trips will be problematic. So if you export to doc and then reimport
and then export again you will likely have some difficulty.

\- Some things won't work (like multi-page footnotes) because Word formats
them incorrectly. This will affect pagination, but probably will be fine for
most things other than legal documents.

\- Fonts can be a problem. If you don't install the same fonts you can have
font metric problems. This isn't really an issue because it is easy to install
the same fonts. Some Linux distros don't make it easy because the fonts are
non-free (as in freedom), though.

I worked for 5 years teaching English and for 4 or those years I had to
interoperate with people using Office (they were forced to use Open Office in
the 5th year because the school board decided not to renew their MS licenses).
I was making _very_ complicated documents with precise layout, multi-lingual
fonts (Japanese and English), and many pictures. I very rarely had any
problems. Don't get me wrong. I hate Open Office with a passion (and I'm glad
that as a programmer once again I never have to touch it). But it's not really
much different than Word in that respect ;-)

Some work flows are just impossible, though. If you are group editing a
document and marking it up as you pass it around a group, then it just won't
work because there will be too many round trips. As I said, there will be
pagination issues for very complex formatting and so it is not possible to use
for legal work (most people who do serious legal work use Word Perfect,
though, because Word's formatting is broken).

As for resumes, I always avoided sending doc files to people for fear that
someone would try to edit it. I always send PDFs. However, in the few cases
where I was not allowed to submit anything other than a doc file (for example
my teaching job), I had absolutely no trouble. YMMV.

And for what it's worth, the programmers at Microsoft actually work very hard
at keeping things as interoperable as they can (as far as I can tell). It's
just that they have a massively huge legacy app and it's hard to work with.
The MS QAs even used to send me bug reports when Word Perfect outputted poor
doc files.

I'm not a fan of MS, but in the course of my career I've worked with a lot of
past and present MS programmers/QAs. I don't have a bad word to say about any
of them. In fact, when we did some joint ventures with MS while I was at
Corel, the QAs we worked with were some of the best I've ever met.

------
outside1234
I don't know about Windows 10 but I will help a friend skip GNU/Linux and use
Ubuntu.

~~~
umanwizard
Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux distribution; what point were you trying to make?

~~~
fallat
It was just a bad joke.

