| Like a lot of people, I got fed up of the tech calls from relatives. I put mother on Mint years ago. An old Toshiba laptop which she uses to read papers and play mahjongg. It ended up developing a hardware fault so I donated an iMac my SO no longer had a use for. Putting Mint on it was just a small mess around. Copied her home directory over, installed a short list of forced installed programs, and she was happy again. Same story with my uncle. Tried to get my sister on Linux but her rotten employer insists on Windows software, and she is so untechnical that she stamps her feet at trying to use alternatives. She got a ThinkPad and a warning that "I do not use Windows, so you're on your own". I had the honour of attending my (ex) step son's graduation a few years ago. Computer related degree, with honours and colours, very sharp young man. He thanked me for building him his first computer and attributed the degree to me putting Windows on it for his Lego games, but also dual boot Linux. I never pressured him to boot into Linux, but that horse wandered over and drunk deeply at some point. I told him it wasn't me; I just gave him a tool, and he decided to learn how to use it. Linux has been my primary OS for a very long time. Every story on here or Slashdot where something terrible happens to it, or they try to put adverts in, program shops, take away more advanced functionality, make it harder to use, lock off settings people use; I just silently thank Linus for devoting his life and stress levels to giving us a very viable alternative. That's not to say I haven't pulled my hair out at times. Kernel patches, out of tree modules, scripting, compatibility with MSFT formats, forks of major projects, drivers which all of a sudden require a version downgrade to carry on working (currently wpa_supplicant on Arch is in my IgnorePkg section on a MacBook Pro) and other annoyances are the reasons I sympathise with the people who say it's too hard to use and takes too long to make work on their setup. Canonical did the world a favour I didn't think would turn out so well; it got a lot of noobs asking questions (obvious or otherwise) to fill the Interwebs with answers which make it a lot easier than the old days to fix an issue you find. The year of Linux on the desktop is maybe going to happen, maybe not. But the number of people who have tried it, or even heard of it is growing. Working with the public for decades I've had the opportunity to ask random people about it and more than ever they don't see it as an esoteric and eldritch hacker OS, just an alternative. |