The best one I’ve ever heard is they like the Microsoft wallpapers. Yes i told them you can use them on linux too. But they argued with me that they wouldn’t be compatible.
A friend of mine finally decided to heed my advice and try it out. He successfully installed fedora and was pleasantly surprised by the ‘clean’ design (of gnome). He then enabled his Bluetooth headphones and DMed me that they won’t connect. The BT menu wouldn’t show them.
Now, I wouldn’t call him stupid, so I committed a grave sin of troubleshooting when I decided to not offend his intelligence. We hopped on a call and started debugging. Looking at drivers, support for his hardware, logs for any errors… He didn’t have another device to connect through BT at the moment and I was out of ideas, so we called it a night and decided to try again tomorrow.
By the time we reconnected the next day, he had already reinstalled windows, but was suffering from the same issue.
And then it downed on me… “Did you pair your headphones?” I asked, afraid of the answer. He just blinked twice and the “what do you mean?” hit me so hard I couldn’t even laugh. “I’ve never had to do that before…”
Some painful explanations later, or an argument really, and his headphones were paired. But by that time he had had enough and didn’t want me to bother him about Linux again. Needless to say, pointing out it was his misunderstanding of the technology that ultimately led to this outcome didn’t really help.
This memory still injects fury in my veins as I fall asleep, right there with fumbling my words when speaking with my highschool crush…
“I’ve never had to do that before…”
Not trying to shit on the guy, but like, that’s literally the first thing you do with BT anything. 😄
I guess that really depends on the equipment though, some devices when you turn it on for the first time will automatically enter pairing mode, so all that had to be done is click it in the bluetooth menu, but it might not auto enter pairing mode when you turn it on after. So it’s unlikely the user ever knew they were pairing it, and just clicked through the prompts like many do
Yeah, no, of course. But that’s kinda my point: there was still an initial pairing. I’m not trying to be antagonistic or anything. I just find it a bit silly that one could research how to replace their entire OS with one they’re not familiar with but not realize they’re gonna have to re-pair their BT devices.
Then again, I think we’re all guilty of sometimes missing small details. I once put a PC together for a buddy and couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t post only to eventually realize I was a dummy who forgot to plug in the CPU power. 😂
We all have been there. First technical build I struggled for 45 minutes trying to figure out why I was getting a zero display whatsoever only to find out that I plugged that damn HDMI cable into the wrong port, and the board had disabled everything including post and splash from using the motherboards port
I find a big part of trying to be the friend that transitions to Linux is taking on the role of mentor. It’s something a lot of wish we could just hand to someone and dust off our hands, but that ultimately leads to experiences like yours.
For a better chance of success, especially on first install, be on the line with them as they go through the steps, or in person is better yet.
Answer all the questions you can and help them install all their usual stuff. Most people don’t want to have to go through this change, so making it fun and social goes a long way.
Indeed that was my intention. I just never thought that he wouldn’t be familiar with something so ubiquitous in today’s world, so I didn’t even think to ask. That’s why this situation is so infuriating to me, not so much that he didn’t know, but that my assumptions prevented me to resolve it
Most people’s reasons in my experience demonstrate to me that they have a perception of Linux as it was 15+ years ago.
I discussed switching to Linux with a group of friends in a voice chat some time ago, most were fairly open to it, and one or two have switched since, but mainly their reasons were time constraints, not wanting to go through the process of backing up files, and finding alternative software.
One guy in particular brought up gaming, MS office, and some other particular software they used. I showed them protondb and every game they looked up was gold or higher, showed them libre office which they could not complain about since it generally works a lot nicer, and it turned out that other software was available as a .deb. After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.
Fair enough I guess, though they couldn’t really produce the reason as to why.
Generally, people just don’t like any kind of change, even if it has the potential to make them a lot happier.
After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.
This is the response I normally get as well, which infuriates me to no end, because it isn’t an actual reason, it is ultimately their decision, and I feel like they are making a mistake out of laziness or perceived comfort.
“but I like Windows”
I can’t imagine any better reason to use Windows than that.
but they don’t know the alternatives
like a child who only eats one type of food but never even touched othersI still can’t imagine any better reason.
because you haven’t tried the alternatives
tbf it is hard to try new things, especially initially
It’s my opinion that most people think of all the technology as it were 15 years ago. Apple was innovative, Google wasn’t evil, Windows worked well, and Linux was not as accessible as it is today.
I had two bouts with Linux in the distant past, and neither time did I think Linux was anything worth pursuing. Not that it was bad, I just didn’t see a benefit over the alternatives. In fact the alternatives had all the benefits in my mind.
When I switched a year ago, I was blown away how far it had come as far as being accessible. Now I can’t imagine using Windows as my primary OS ever again.
I think for the MS Office thing, it depends on what it’s being used for. If it’s just creating a fresh document or editing a simple existing docx, LibreOffice it totally fine; I’ve heavily exclusively used LibreOffice Writer during my time in college and been okay, as I’m either just writing in MLA or using a provided Word file that I can then just save as an ODT after initial conversion and export as a PDF when it comes time to turn it in.
However, from what I can tell, if you’re working in an organization that extensively uses MS Office, files may need to survive multiple openings and edits between multiple editors, and multiple cycles of translating between document representations can lead to degraded documents and just make your work life absolutely miserable. Thus, LibreOffice isn’t an option, though I hear there are more MS-compatible suites that are usable on Linux, though not all of them FOSS.
This is why I’ve so far left my mother alone about Linux; maybe if I saw some evidence that her workflow would be more amenable to LibreOffice than I think it is, I’d reconsider.
I just had the damnest experience with Office. Some institution required me to deliver a “doc” document with it’s respective PDF. I’m a Linux user, so there was gonna be some trouble. This document was viewed and edited by several instances, so I decided to use an online tool. Google Docs it was, but this was before the doc requirement. So, after the fact, my solution was similar: to just use the online version of Office, which I had access to through my job. Cool. Well, no. Delivered the document and the doc wasn’t consistent with the Office desktop they were using. Long story short I had to figure out their Office version and borrow a computer with the same Office desktop version they were using, pirated, of course.
My experience with LibreOffice is it works fine if you’re doing straightforward things by yourself. MLA formatted essay? “Twelve point double-spaced Times New Roman or you get a zero” and they never noticed my papers were Liberation Sans? Sure that works. “Pick a partner and make a 20 slide PowerPoint presentation” is a nightmare because sharing files back and forth between Powerpoint and Impress doesn’t work very well.
The more usable solution to that is Google Docs. I had a group project with four other guys, and we were all sat around a table typing in the same document at the same time on three different operating systems. Played perfectly well with Windows, Mac and Linux. Us Linux nerds who hate “the cloud” because “someone else’s computer” and Google because “
Don’tBe Evil” kind of lurch at that one, but it functions.
“Never used Linux,” They say, typing on a chromebook or android phone, before picking up their steamdeck.
while browsing the web (hosted on linux).
Not to interject, but when people talk about using “Linux” they’re generally referring to desktop Linux (usually GNU/Linux). ChromeOS and SteamOS are Linux distros of a sort under the hood, but they’re also highly curated experiences. Android technically uses the Linux kernel but architecturally it’s so drastically different from basically any other system using it that it’s quite misleading to call it “Linux” in the colloquial sense.
”You can’t trust free software”
If it came pre-installed on laptop majority wouldn’t mind.
That’s really the crux of it. M$ bought in back in the 80s and people are too damn lazy to change their defaults.
Why you out there telling people to install it? Those who want it will find it. This isn’t an evangelical mission.
Yeah like, holy shit the pseudo religious bullshit here is getting annoying. I like Linux, I am supremely unlikely to ever even touch a windows system again (minus the occasional time where I might have to for work when accessing client systems) but this weird cult behavior is aggravating.
My grandfather’s reason for it. “It will be too different from my current system”
… the only thing he does is the web browser, and bookworm deluxe which i have confirmed does work via wine. I was recommending him install an OS called q4os, which I have on my laptop, I showed him the side by side comparison of q4os vs windows. For a point of reference this is what q4os looks like
I think he is too scared of change.
I still don’t know how Wine works and I’m a Linux advocate.
It’s pretty simple actually. Mine runs the program as it would normally and whenever the program reaches out to say “create this file” or “load this font” for example Wine will grab that call and translate it into a Linux OS command. As long as the program gets all their Windows API calls and windows specific files requests satisfied it will happily continue.
This is why ARM support is such a hassle for wine since the processor is with a different architecture so the compiled binary needs to be translated as well with all the nuances.
yea but he wouldn’t need to handle that, I do all his setup, he just has to click the shortcut that opens the game just like he does currently.
It translates Windows API calls to X and POSIX API calls. Theoretically it comes with a performance hit but as benchmarks have shown that is usually not the case as both Wine and the entire system as a whole are more efficient than Windows. Wine will fail whenever an application requests an API call that is not implemented yet, sometimes copying DLLs from Windows helps, sometimes…
That’s on you
Devil’s advocate here. When people complain about phone calls, or going out in public, or being social, I think “it’s not hard.” I know for some people it is a massive hassle.
Apply that same sentiment to having to learn an OS that is irrelevant to your job or seems difficult or you’re not interested in.
“Lack of consensus on pronunciation of name.”
And I stand by it.
Agreed. But it does make it easy to tell evil Linux users from good Linux users. I pronounced it so you can tell who is who.
I’m so glad you agree that Linux users are the evil ones.
Obvious, right? Only an evil person would say it that way.
“Linux isn’t made for professional use” - Colleague from Work who is an Apple stan. And yes he bought the Apple™ Cloth for iPhone.
This was quite a few years ago, but a friend of mine said he’d tried Linux but had switched back because some clipboard feature he was used to using didn’t work (sorry, I forget the details). He was a programmer to, so perfectly capable of troubleshooting or finding some alternative tool. I just stared at him dumbfounded.
Sadly its really hard to change habits. But it goes both ways, every time I need to use windows I find myself grunting for every minor thing that doesn’t work as expected.
I get him though, mouse wheel click for a secondary copy buffer is one of the main things that’s extremely annoying to me when I have to use Windows, I can never retrain my brain to stop doing it and I get annoyed that it doesn’t work until I remember why.
What if the browser doesn’t work? It will work.
my motherboards drivers don’t come with windows, and so when i tried to install it and it forced me to connect to the internet, i just couldn’t. luckily i found a usb dongle to ethernet which worked ootb.
never had a weird mono driver issue like that on any linux distro i tried.
I did because the laptop I had bought had a brand new processor and not all the drivers were in the kernel version that was in the distro’s newest ISO. I had to plug in a keyboard, screen, and network adapter to install the right kernel.
Most silly excuse was my boss refusing to install Linux because he just had a friend give him original windows 98se licenses for the PCs we just bought for the company.
Well it gets less silly thinking that getting the eprom programmer software and orcad 4 working on Linux was probably impossible.
Then it was outright the best decision ever, because those machines never required a reinstall and worked flawless for the 5 years I was there working. Never understood the bad rep W98Se had. Never used it on my personal rigs of course.
for alot of people their relationship with windows is like that of an abusive partner. which is why you see alot of the same excuses pop up
“I wanna try out this FreeBSD thing.”
