Linux is user friendly

[austin.payne]

Okay so let me tell you a little story. I have a friend who is 13 years old. Her computer broke and she asked me to fix it. So I took a look at it and saw that the hard drive was broke. So called her dad, and told him that the hard drive was broke, and since there was no back up, I was going to have to reinstall the operating system. I told him that windows 7 was about $70 on new egg, or I could install LinuxLite. I was told that $70 dollars was out of the question. So I grab my spare hard drive, and put LinuxLite on it. I gave her back her laptop, showed her the basics, and went on my way. After she had been using it for a couple months I asked her how it was going. She said that it works just fine and that she wasn't having any problems.

Now if a thirteen year old can do it, why do people think it is so hard?

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[newtusmaximus]

Did you manage to get her files off the old drive as well?

[Duckeenie]

From my own experience, an example comes to mind: Tell her to install Plex on it by herself. When you return don't forget to duck.

Literally takes a minute to do it on Windows but on Linux I had to learn so many things before I could get it to work. Examples like this are quite isolated these days but I bet most new users that admin their own systems could come up at least one. Having said that, maybe it's the same on Windows, and that's actually the issue, people have been using it for too long to remember how hard the learning process was?

Anyway, I do agree that Linux IS ultimately more user-friendly than Windows but I suspect that there is still more of a mandatory learning curve on Linux that sometimes trips one up even during everyday use. If one hits one of those barriers too early in the transition one often just gives up.

Transitioning to Linux from Windows for me has been a little like stopping smoking. In the beginning at times it just seemed like too much effort, but ultimately, given the alternative, I knew it was for the best. (God that's cheesy)

[Valtam]

In these types of examples, I always ask people to remember and consider one thing. At some point in time in your computer experience, you had to learn windows from scratch, and you most likely did it because you had to for a job, out of sheer curiosity, or because it was new and fun. Now, you have to somewhat start again, but with an already established, intuitive understanding of computers. The main difference this time is that the main motivation (or so I would hope!) is because you equate linux with freedom, and that is worth struggling for. I'm a realist to, which means that I understand that many people choose linux simply because it costs nothing. When something is free, there is always a price to pay The reward comes later in the form of seeing that you are a part of something ethical and right.