I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
The bigger problem is that there’s often no one willing to show you how to use it. I had a friend who managed to picked it up himself, and when I asked him to show me the ropes all I got out of him was “just Google it”. Now, of course that’s how you figure all sorts of things out and an essential skill in itself, but first you need to know what to search for, and if you’re just starting out you’re probably not going to know what that is - or you’ll have more abstract but simple problems like figuring out issues with syntax in the terminal. That kind of thing is really easy for another person who knows to say “no, it’s like this, because of that” but can be very difficult for a person to figure out on their own.
Quite often it seems like people have gone through these trials themselves, but then rather than making it easier for other people and helping them they leave them to face the same challenges all over again from scratch. This is very frustrating, when you know there’s an answer that someone could just give you but it’s not apparent to you, which leads to people throwing in the towel.
When you’re saying it, it’s actually striking how many Linux users are self taught.
Then again, all my friends the last ten years have known there’s a standing offer for me to install Linux for them and teach them how to use it. Some have in occasionally, especially when their windows computers grew unusable, but generally they’ll use it and be happy with it and then revert back to windows when they eventually buy a new computer and it comes preinstalled.
The exception is my dad, who now actively asks me to install Ubuntu for him whenever he has a new computer. He never asked me to install it on the first place though - I just accidentally broke Windows while trying to set up a dual boot on the home computer back in my early teenage years.
