Linux needs to grow. Stop telling people it’s ‘tech-y’ or acting like you’re more advanced for using it, you are scaring away people. Linux Mint can be used by a senile person perfectly.
Explain shortly the benefits, ‘faster, more secure, easier to use, main choices of professionals and free’. Ask questions that let you know if they need to dual boot, ‘do you use Adobe, anti-cheat games, or Microsoft Office’, ‘how new is your computer’, ‘do you use a Mac’.
And most importantly, offer to help them install.
They don’t understand the concept of distros, just suggest Linux Mint LTS Cinnamon unless they’re curious.
That’s it, spread Linux to as many people as possible. The larger the marketshare, the better support we ALL get. We can fight enshittification. Take the time to spread it but don’t force it on anyone.
AND STOP SCARING PEOPLE AWAY. Linux has no advertising money, it’s up to us.
Offer family members or friends your help or copy and paste the below
how to install linux: 1) copy down your windows product key 2) backup your files to a harddrive 3) install the linux mint cinnamon iso from the linux mint website 4) use etcher (download from its website) to put the iso on a usb flash drive 5) go into bios 6) boot from the usb 7) erase the storage and install 8) press update all in the update manager 9) celebrate. it takes 15 minutes.
edit: LET ME RE-STATE, DO NOT FORCE IT ON ANYONE.
and if someone is at the level of ignorance (not in a derogatory fashion) that they dont know what a file even is genuinely dont bother unless theyre your parents cause youll be tech support for their ‘how do i install the internet’ questions.
Things are about to get worse for onboarding those from other platforms. There’s been this massive push the last year to get every window manager to switch to Wayland & drop X11 support… meanwhile Wayland doesn’t support color profiles or color management (just sRGB). How are you going to convince someone with an awesome screen to drop down to sRGB? How will you convince someone with a poor screen that has been color calibrated to make it usable to go back to off colors? How do you expect content creators to migrate & still create content if they can’t have access to all the color tools they use in their workflow to come to Linux when Wayland won’t support them? A lot of Linux folk act like this doesn’t matter, but to a lot of people, a computer is a magic box that they interact with via a screen + keyboard + mouse, & if non-niche peripherals aren’t supported (which DCI-P3 is becoming the norm & saving a screen from a landfill can often be fixed to ‘good enough’ thru calibration), users will think it’s trash & unfinished.