It has been a good experience, watching a family member adopt Ubuntu. I had forgotten a lot of the excitement and intrigue that comes with discovering everything there is and how things work.
Or maybe it’s just been so long since I adopted it myself that I had taken for granted the emotional rush that accompanies it. I’m getting e-mails now saying things like, “How could I have wasted so much time?” or “Why couldn’t see all this before?” or “I was a fool not to try this years ago.”
It’s also good, because hearing (or reading) those reactions is fueling my own sense of indignation again. Only a month ago I had reached a point where I really didn’t care whose side you were on, as long as you were content with using your computer.
But coaching someone through their own transition has exposed me to all the vitriol, and rekindled my own amazement. How is it possible to dump a broken, incomplete product on the public, at such a huge individual cost? Why not share the code at the lowest level, so everyone can use the software as they need? Why force people to use — or worse, to buy — your product, rather than give them a choice? And how is it, for decades, that a faulty, clunky, bland and inferior operating system has been the de facto industry standard?
So perhaps I’m back in the fight. Maybe now I can borrow some of the adrenaline I see in my relative, and elsewhere on the Internet, and restart my own crusade against Bug No. 1. I’d be a fool not to.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
AMEN! (in a black american preacher voice) 😛
I don’t try and get my friends on linux very much these days. Mostly because a lot of them play windows-only games or are just too much of a ‘power user’ to switch. Although I very much respect people who evangelise the OS, I’m quite happy to quietly run my Arch and Ubuntu systems and let other people get on with their computing lives.
That said, I have managed to get a few of my friends to at least try Linux, but they have to be people who use their computers for things that Linux is good at.
THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAAAAA!
FOR MOTHER RUSSIA!!!
sorry, couldn’t hold it =)
With ya 100%. Its ridiclious that Windows has been put on such a high pedestal, when its doing things now that Linux and even Mac have been doing for so long, but never quite get them just as right. UAC for example, an attempt at forming something like gksudo, just didn’t work. Everyone hated it. Sudo however, makes sense. Linux trusts that you know what you’re doing, unless you tell it you don’t.
Its just mind boggling that Microsoft have been getting away with it for so long :S
The reason windows is copying Linux now is because the stuff they steal is stuff that has proven itself useful and valuable in apps.
Tabbed browsing has only just made its way into IE because every other browser does it.
I too remember that feeling of “why didn’t I try this before”, when I tried ubuntu7.10, the fact that it supported my hardware helped.
Using Debian in the console these days, i i’ve (pro/re)gressed since then 😉