Linux Day!

My friend finally installed Linux on something. It was an old box he had that Best Lie told him was totally non-fixable. Turns out they were half-right. As long as you wanted to run Windows, the box was trashed. We threw Debian Linux on there with a net_inst disc. Whoops! HDD runs fine!

It was somewhat humorous because of the preconceived notions. I'll put my observations here.

1) MS users assume that there will be more to do to be able to run the system after install.
2) MS users assume that Linux will be really really (really) hard to get used to
3) MS users believe that everything will be harder to get working in Linux

This is a non-complete list, but it seems to be the trend with people I've helped convert. My parents, a student, and several friends have all had similar reactions.

After I did a quick demo of Synaptic, my friend said, "Wow! It's that easy and fast? Why doesn't everyone do this?"

I think that we're fighting a battle of perceptions. Done correctly, almost all non-hardware related difficulties can be resolved in Linux quite quickly. At least, I guess I should say the difficulties I've come across. Well, I should say that this is with the obvious exception of installing unstable software. I installed some stuff from source (CVS tree) that is fairly difficult.

Anyway, congratulations you new Linux users out there! Stick with it! You'll find that most things you want to do will be easier!