Linux

"Never used Linux," They say, typing on a chromebook or android phone, before picking up their steamdeck.

”You can’t trust free software”

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...

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.

Some years ago, mentioning Linux for daily non-gaming use:

Guy: "Installing Linux is complicated though"

Me: "It wasn't bad 10 years ago, and now it's as hard as clicking Next a few times, even faster than Windows"

Guy: "Well duh, you have ten years of experience installing it!"

Difficult to argue with this non-logic.

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.

"Linux isn't made for professional use" - Colleague from Work who is an Apple stan. And yes he bought the Apple™ Cloth for iPhone.

"Lack of consensus on pronunciation of name."

And I stand by it.

The whatchacallit, terminal with super cryptic commands is too hard. When I go on the internet and say my system has a problem and they tell me to type sudo pacman -Syu, I need something more easier than that. You know like-- with more steps. And five modal GUIs. And buttons.

If it came pre-installed on laptop majority wouldn't mind.

Why you out there telling people to install it? Those who want it will find it. This isn't an evangelical mission.

"I wanna try out this FreeBSD thing."

"I don't want to learn something new"

How tf am I supposed to respond to that?

What if the browser doesn't work? It will work.

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.

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.

Here's my stupid reason. I only play video games, I like using mods, I don't use steam and all my games come in .exes from fitgirl lol. I'm sure it's possible to do it on Linux. I'm certain it's more difficult.

"not polished enough" when comparing to widose

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.

there's a meme i've seen a few times about how it's "an operating system for coding"

the dumbest reason was that they hate penquins, but the one you can't argue with is that they don't need to because it does all they need it to do

A surprising amount of people have put up this mental wall separating "SteamOS" from Linux.

I've had this conversation with multiple people and it's being brought up again because of the Steam Machine announcement.

Some (very few) legitimately didn't know SteamOS was a Linux distro, Or they knew it was based on Linux but thought it used a whole different user ecosystem. Like how Android is technically Linux but using it is nothing like using desktop Linux. These people I've found are more willing to actually look into Linux after someone's explained to them that SteamOS is just Linux. And that there's even SteamOS-like Linux distros you can use right now!

Then you have those who are hard-line about having Official SteamOS. And most of the time they have some misguided believe along the line of, SteamOS is Linux but Valve has fixed all the "Linux issues". And for a lot of them you're probably not going to get far convincing them that mainline Linux isn't just endless command lines these days.

"it's not for desktop use"

@lordnikon They say "I don't want to code to download an app", but there's actual app stores now on many of the most popular distros.

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 think I made the mistake of pushing my grandfather away from Linux. He’s retired but does some professional photography; he’s used Photoshop for years, but said he’s open to leaving Adobe.

One day recently, he told me he heard about “this Linux thing” and asked me if it would be a good fit and run Windows applications well. I told him his main issue was probably Photoshop, and that even switching, he’d still need some stable, consistent way to open past PSD files. In retrospect, maybe I should have looked more closely at his use case to see the complexity of his edits and if they might have worked well in another program that runs on Linux.