My converts!

[Jedinovice]

It’s final exam season and I am literally working seven days a week. Not much time for posting.

But this is worth a post. When I first got into Linux in Indonesia I figured everyone would rush for free, easy to use, non user restricted software, especially in a poor country.

Wrong.

Everyone was totally wedded to Windows and Linux could not compete with PIRATE! I pointed out all the problems of going pirate but it was virtually part of the culture and I got zero converts. I showed everyone how Mint Linux was way ahead of Windows 7 and ... everyone was impressed and went back to Windows. I pointed out it was free and I was told, "Yes, but we have pirate!"

I genuinely gave up! Indeed, I said to those around me, “From now I am just going to be that smug Linux user who sneers when you Windows crashes on your or refuses to do what you want… again… and leave you to your misery!”

But, after YEARS, I have got converts!! It happened. But it was delayed reaction. Here is the list - not a lot but Linux has to compete with pirate, as I say.

1) My wife. After having to use my little single core Atom netbook (Now, sadly deceased) in an emergency she was so impressed at how fast and friendly it was (we’re talking Mint Linux 17.0 KDE edition on a 1GB atom n455 here) that she took the netbook off me and could not give it back! Later she asked for Windows to be removed from the Toshiba celeron laptop as well. She is 100% Linux now.

2) I spent a little while working at a local Singaporean based school here in Indonesia…. And and left as quickly as I could after being worked to death! It was literally 14-18 hours a day 7 days a week. Nearly killed me. It’s the Singaporean way – you literally live to work. But, before I left, I helped a lovely teacher buy an i5 laptop (exactly the kind of machine I could never afford!) and loaded Mint 15 KDE edition on it. It then became clear I could not stay at the school. Apart from the affect on my health I also had ‘fellow’ teachers deliberately sabotaging me so I would leave. Given I had no incentive to stay, I left! My teacher fried and I lost contact for three years. Well, I met her again recently and we re both running our won private tuition businesses and she is STILL running Linux! She had no trouble. I naturally had assumed that she would have switched mack to Windows as everyone else had in days gone by. But no… because Mint Linux KDE gave no troubles. As it is… the OS is now busted. Because the hard disk has failed! I will be installing Mint 18 when that is fixed… only she is now discovering the horrors of final exam season as well and has not time to get the HDD replaced!

3) My old boss. We both since left my old school and I now hire him on a part time basis to help out with kids classes! He had a very, very, very cheap AMD E-1200 Samsung laptop with the dodgiest pirate copy of WIndows 7 you ever did see. It just KEPT crashing! He absolutely REFUSED to consider Linux even when I was able to demo KDE running faster, better and carrying our MORE tasks than the ones he could run under WIndows. He was resolute. Only Windows kept crashing. In the end he re-installed another pirate version of Windows… which kept crashing on him. So, reluctantly, sheepishly.. he asked for me to put Mint Linux KDE on his machine Result: 18 months later – NO PROBLEMS!!! He now gets the point.

4) One of my wife’s students – age about 9 I think – has the same laptop as me – a cheapo ASUS x200m. Hers is actually older than mind, a MK1 using the celeron 1007U processor. It shows the difference in our usage in that her X200 is in MINT condition! Mine… has been used so hard that my students think it is five or more years old! Anyway… she ASKED for Mint Linux on the machine because it was clearly so much easier than Windows. I put Mint 18 KDE on the machine and she is delighted. No problems.

5) Another teacher at my previous school left the school and came back. While he was away .. he remembered my going on about Linux and actually went Ubuntu! Using… Unity.
Yuck.
Only… after a while it became clear that we could not control Unity at all and could not get it to behave sensibly. So, it took a bit of persuading but we went… yup, Mint Linux KDE!

Result: The machine now works the way he wants it to and we can fix any issues without dropping to the command line every time. [Who the hell thought Unity was progress?]


6) A students of mine - around 11 - had an 'old' four core i5 laptop with a busted version of Windows on it. He was so impressed with Mint KDE on my laptop and wanted to get into video editing. So I actively asked to install Mint KDE on the machine with Kdenlive. Due to exam season we have not had time to get together to 'geek' but he regards Mint KDE as streets ahead of Mac. Yes, the family is Mac based and the i5 laptop was an old backup!
You will notice I have gone KDE in each and all cases. These three reasons….

1) I use KDE exclusively and if I am going to support people it’s good to standardize.
2) KDE is very much like Windows which helps for those who have been WEDDED to Windows 7!! So the learning curve is gentle. My students are all Mac users but everyone else is wedded to Windows 7.
3) With KDE the answer is always “yes.” This is essential for new users who always want some feature in Windows or Mac that is… different in any other distro. With KDE I can always set the way the user expects and there is never a feature missing.

Generally users do not care much for speed or security but they do care about (missing) features.

Also, I had two students who wanted me to teach them IT – real IT! We had to use Mint Linux because there was no realistic means of partitioning a hard disk and installing either Windows or MacOS – especially with all the activation business. Both agreed that Mint Linux KDE was “far better than Mac.” Both students were Mac users… under duress with parents who believed that Mac was cool. [My students are almost all ethnic Chinese to whom the concept of ;face’ rather requires them to buy expensive and status laden rather than functional.) One of those students ended up doing video editing using Kdenlive on a VM on his Mac and blowing away his classmates and teachers at what he could accomplish compared to the feeble capabilities of their expensive Macs. As I say, where I am, the rich Chinese are all Mac users due to ‘face.’ O yeah, an that same user has just had to trash his Mac… because of a virus that killed his OS.

So, it took years but I have got converts!

[jimallyn]

Good for you, Jedinovice! I have made a few converts, but like you, I am amazed at how people resist Linux. Why would anybody not want to run better software, and for free?

[Faust]

One can only keep trying to spread the word

My main machine runs Mint 17.3 Cinnamon ( although I need several other systems for my work ).
The resistance thing is hard to figure .... many have seen my system and praised it , but don't want to try Linux
for themselves .
The most frequent response is " I don't have the time to learn a new OS "

I'm also on a mission to get people to switch from Skype to one of the Tox variants , with equally little success !

The words Horse , Water and Drink come to mind ....

It doesn't stop me from trying though .

[jimallyn]

The most frequent response is " I don't have the time to learn a new OS "

I hear that one a lot, too. What's to learn? You click on the Menu button, find the program you want to use, click on it, and away you go. I would think that for most people, the only things that they have to learn is how to install new programs, and how to do updates.

[Jedinovice]

The most frequent response is " I don't have the time to learn a new OS "

I hear that one a lot, too. What's to learn? You click on the Menu button, find the program you want to use, click on it, and away you go. I would think that for most people, the only things that they have to learn is how to install new programs, and how to do updates.

And those same users are the ones who pick up Android on a tablet or a smartphone and fly with it...