Help a friend skip Windows 10 and try GNU/Linux

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/help-a-friend-skip-windows-10-and-try-gnu-linux

by lelf • 11 years ago

87 56 11 years ago

Sir_Cmpwn• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane2• 11 years ago

Help them even more by trying GNU/HURD.

chc• 11 years ago

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?

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

Not a bad idea, if you're an interested hacker. I certainly would not recommend it to an end user or a hacker who wants a daily use machine.

InclinedPlane2• 11 years ago

Watching the voting on this has been pretty funny. I wish I had the ability to divine the reasoning for every vote. For reference, this was a joke.

ethana• 11 years ago

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.

svckr• 11 years ago

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-fnord2• 11 years ago

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.

teach• 11 years ago

I'm in the same boat. I dual-booted from 2001 to 2003, but then just switched to Linux full-time. I'm strongly considering dual-booting again to play with Windows 10, but I'm also pretty sure I wouldn't know how to do anything.

outside1234• 11 years ago

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

umanwizard• 11 years ago

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

fallat2• 11 years ago

It was just a bad joke.

Udo3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

mikekchar3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

davnicwil2• 11 years 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.

reedlaw4• 11 years 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.

iudhiubdiu• 11 years ago

their typically long and painful setup process

Mint can be installed in about 10 minutes with a handful of mouse clicks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKI024wUTUw

reedlaw4• 11 years 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/

Udo3• 11 years 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.

ramgorur• 11 years 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.

rndmize• 11 years ago

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.

istvan__• 11 years ago

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.

DKnoll3• 11 years ago

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

DKnoll3• 11 years ago

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.

jschwartzi• 11 years ago

The one thing Linux excels at over any other platform I've tried is for embedded development. Try mounting a dd image anywhere else and you'll see what I mean.

mikekchar3• 11 years ago

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...

beeboop• 11 years ago

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.

aidenn0• 11 years ago

I've been a Linux user for 15 years and only once got Ubuntu working in 3 tries (and I had to manually enter a modeline to my xorg config to do so!). Judging by how many people I know who run Ubuntu, I must be unlucky.

edgyswingset• 11 years ago

This has nearly always been my experience with a Linux distro. My most recent experience with Ubuntu was a gigantic mouse pointer and the whole GUI zoomed in to what looked like 1000% or something.

Even as a technical person, I really do appreciate it when my home computing devices don't fail the first time I try to use them.

unknownknowns• 11 years ago

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 :-)

barbs• 11 years ago

This surprises me, I've never had any issues with booting and installing Ubuntu or variants thereof.

sanoli2• 11 years ago

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.

fallat2• 11 years ago

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

foiboitoi• 11 years ago

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.

code_sterling• 11 years ago

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.

ankursanghi• 11 years ago

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...

robgibbons2• 11 years ago

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.

valdiorn2• 11 years ago

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.

Join us over here in the gray area, mate...

Delmania2• 11 years ago

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.

robgibbons2• 11 years ago

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.

norea-armozel• 11 years ago

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.

Not to be mean but have you tried even creating a toy kernel yourself with modern tools? Now imagine doing that in the 1980s when none of those tools existed (it's why bison exists for programming language construction and the like). It doesn't matter how many people you throw at a project if the scope of it is as generalized as an operating system tool kit and kernel then it's going to take a long time to build it and longer still to extend support for it to newer hardware (especially in light of how many modern motherboards and peripherals have blackboxed firmware that's patent encumbered). And that's just the technical limitations. When you factor in the problem of managing different groups, keeping them on target for features to be released and bugfixes, egos to be checked/soothed, and so forth then you got a problem that would make the creation of the US Constitution seem easy.

Ultimately, I think folks like you are the classic true believers that don't have much in the way of understanding people. You demand people to comply to your ideologies even if their lives are lessened by it. You demand that each person wears a hair shirt just for the sake of it. And that for me isn't something I can see working. Anarchists tried that crap in the 19th century and it failed terribly (and I'm an anarchist today). Purism is cute and it's nice when you write about in essays, but it's not how you get real people with irrational beliefs, subjective one-off experiences, and divergent goals to adopt and apply your ideology. You start on the basics and you yourself show others how that works out in those basic situations. Before you demand others to apply your specific approach to Free Software ask yourself if it actually adds immediate value their lives. If not then your approach fails to be useful or effective. And your purity for its own sake is a weak excuse for actual results. /rant

valdiorn2• 11 years ago

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.

Help a friend skip Windows 10 and try GNU/Linux

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