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So here i am - sorry to be annoying - but like, i don't want to be here to be annoying- trust me. I just wanna be leftalone to make art, but that aint happening anytime soon, so guess yoire stuck wigh me, linux peeps. And there will be more of me, seeing how censorship is going

So figure ojt how to deal with people like me if you are serious about spreading linux

How do you make linux approachable for peeps who DON'T HAVE a @feff in their lives?

in reply to JenJen

The problem is that 98% of people will never change the operating system and just use what their devices are shipped with.

However, some Linux distributions make it as simple as it gets with their own media writer tools that will create a bootable USB stick for you (see picture).

Then you need to find out how to boot your computer from a USB stick, and that's the time for a big shout out to the computer manufacturers that still couldn't agree on a standard (it's probably F12)

in reply to ralph_himself

Regarding which distribution: it matters less than the desktop environment that you choose, because that's what you'll be working with.

If you are a Windows person, use KDE.

If you are a Mac person, use Gnome.

in reply to ralph_himself

@ralph_himself
You might as well be talking in another language to the users you think you're talking to.

"You need to figure out how to boot the pc from a usb. The distribution doesn't matter, it's the desktop environment."

It's all meaningless to most people using Mac and Windows. When I first used Ubuntu (about 16 years ago), none of that would have made sense to me.

in reply to JenJen

taking this serious for a moment, I think there's a big problem to overcome that is not just tech-elitism or gatekeeping, but the very core of how our society is structured. noone can know and do everything, so we're depending on each other, and our economic system is based on extracting wealth from that dependency. so, proprietary OSs are "easy" to use by design while linux for example doesn't really want to be easy. linux being or becoming easy is an uphill battle. @feff

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in reply to posiputt ÖvÖ

and being honest with myself I am absolutely one of those linux bros that has a hard time really understanding why almost noone would switch. on some level anyway. on other levels I'm very aware that most people do not want to have to understand how computers work beyond what they actually need or want to do with them. the way windows and mac do it is promising an easy experience and then making you depend on their stuff and so on.
in reply to JenJen

it would be better if linux computers were commonly sold in stores. there are many linux distros that anyone can use easily but most people don't know how to install it in the first place
in reply to JenJen

That's something I'm interested in figuring out. I could use a willing partner/participant/subject etc who'd be willing to help figure out what works and what doesn't because tech literacy is really important especially now where tech and fascism are intertwinned.

The best way I've found linux approachable so far is to recommend using @linuxmint but I'd wanna more about your situation.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to JenJen

I'm gonna be honest, what has gotten society into this dependency on billionaire software, is a stubborn resistance to learning even the basics of dealing with computers and expecting everything to "just work". If we ever want to get away from corporations controlling our computers, then EVERYONE will have to learn how to not let a lack of technical literacy be a profit to be exploited.

This doesn't mean everyone has to become a programmer, but at the very least we should all learn the essentials of how the machines we have made part of our lives actually work, and how we can troubleshoot them. Linux is never going to beat corporate software products at "user friendliness", because part of "user friendliness" means taking away options from you and making sure you can't use your software in a way that it isn't intended to. Linux is just not about that, and we shouldn't want it to in the first place.

in reply to JenJen

I'd like to mention that people like you are absolutely crucial. Thanks for sharing! For the tech minded it’s so easy to forget how insanely frustrating the systems we built can be. It needs to be better, more human, and more accessible.

If a user asks a "dumb” question, the response should always be, *why* do they need to ask this question and what needs to be fixed. Not “oh this is easy you just -“