Open letter to all gurus - my Linux anniversary: thanks and suggestions
 

Dear all,

Greetings from a professional :newbie:
Today is my Linux anniversary - one year since I switched completely from Windows to Linux!
:D
(I am responsible for desktops in three small offices, so that's the environment I made the switch in.)

I am extremely grateful for all the experts and gurus of this site who helped me sort out the many various glitches along the way. All the users are happy and love Linux! :thumbsup:

One thing I wanted to express is a little suggestion and, hopefully, constructive criticism. To get straight to the point -
I BELIEVE THERE IS A NEED FOR ANOTHER FORUM FOR DESKTOP USERS SWITCHING FROM WINDOWS/MAC.
I mean the desktop "users" who are not IT professionals or even "super-users" - but just your everyday office workers, designers, and hobbyists.

Many of the respected gurus and very helpful senior users seem to offer solutions that may well be beyond the "simple" user who has just switched from Windows. (I found this issue on both Newbie and Desktop forums).

To illustrate the kind of information those users need: here is a little blog I set up to help my colleagues who made the switch from Windows: https://switchtolinuxdesktop.wordpress.com/

As you can see, those "everyday users" need some very basic, mostly GUI-based techniques to set up their systems to meet their goals. If you see any issues with the info I presented, please let me know.

I hope that more people make a switch from Windows/MAC to Linux, and I believe there will be a mass movement soon as the people realize that Linux Desktop has made the quantum leap from a thing for "geeks only" to something even a grandma can use. But in all my research over the last years, I have not found a place where a non-technically minded Linux newbie would feel comfortable and not get :banghead:

There are sites like "Mint Forum" - but I found a similar issue there. Plus, I don't think it has enough people answering new threads - I usually got a couple of replies only, then - silence. Linux Questions is still my preferred place for help.:study:

Anyway, I know you all are busy helping other Newbies with actual issues - so thank you for reading these ramblings.

(Please feel free to move this thread elsewhere if I picked the wrong forum to post).

Cheers!:hattip:

Open letter to all gurus - my Linux anniversary: thanks and suggestions
 

Good point, and I agree completely. It would also help a little to have a call-in podcast for newbies, along the lines of Ask Noah but more basic.

Nicely done and, as you say, definitely needed.
One "point of order," so to speak. :) Thunar is the Xfce file manager, not the window manager.
:)

It's not a call-in podcast, but you all might want to check out Going Linux.

There's also the Linux Lugcast, which welcomes participation via Mumble.

About about the terminal
 

Solutions via terminal are often presented because they usually work more or less the same or even identically across distributions and DEs. Conversely, different DEs, and the simpler WMs, vary significantly in toolset terminology, complexity and capability. It's much easier to answer when the answer doesn't need to target any particular DE, or a DE actually familiar to a (would be) contributor.

I've been using Linux & BSD since 1999, I usually leave the easy questions to newer respondees to answer & concentrate just on those that I feel need a bit more than basic know how that I can supply.

Maybe you should help these newbies as you are closer to what they are experiencing than us old timers. :)

While it doesn't sound like a bad idea, not sure it's viable. As mrmazda was saying, the sheer amount of distros, DE's, WM's on offer would make it hard to give answers that even the newbie could follow. It's also a bit like the age old question of "which distro do I use?", in that: what works for one, may not for others, also, as much as you'll get people just recommending their favourite distro, you'll just get the same with GUI's happening.

Also, what's a "switching from Windows/Mac to Linux" question look like? Well once again, I'd say a very similar thing as above, what I might consider to be such question, might also be able to be considered to be another kind of question too. Should "what are the differences between Windows and Linux?" question also fall into the same category? Do they have to have used Windows/Mac for a certain period of time before posting to that forum?

There's a psychological problem here. When a home user decides to switch from Windows to Linux, it's because he's fed up with Windows and willing to learn something new. He usually accepts that this will take a bit of effort on his part (though you'd be surprised at the unwillingness of some newbies to learn anything).

Employees who are told by their employer "We're switching to Linux" don't have that motivation. And, after all, why should they? They will go along with it if it's made reasonably easy for them, but the advice that you get on a forum like this one isn't always appropriate. For example, command line is often the quickest way for a home user to diagnose and fix a problem, and you can be sure that the user has access to it, whereas GUIs vary. But office workers certainly won't want to learn the command line just to get out of a problem that never arose under the old system.

You may need to create some scripts for them to run, with simple GUI interfaces to collect the arguments. I remember that one of the librarians where I worked created a script that automated an update, compared the output with a stored standard one and then printed "OK" or "Ask for help". The staff used it without having the faintest idea what they were doing, but they liked it.

Thread moved to Suggestions and Feedback forum.

Congratulations on your 1 year celebration of total Linux, byebyemrgates!

probably you have seen this already: http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

congrats on the year of linux!

I think this may be a bit of an over-simplification. Sometimes persons switch to Linux not because they are fleeing Windows, but because they are coming to Linux. I'll point to my own experience.

I started using Linux because someone I knew and trusted told me I could use it to self-host my website (I no longer self-host). It just happened that the first distro I was able to install on my old surplus computer for hosting my website was Slackware v. 10 (it was so easy to install that I installed it three times that first Saturday afternoon in April until I was satisfied with my decisions at time of install).

After about four months of learning and experimentation, I brought my self-hosted website live. (It had previously been a members.aol.com site, and, when I made the switch, I added a WordPress blog, which was 13 years old this year.)

I made the formal switch to Linux six months later (meaning I took the leap of installing Slackware on the laptop that I used for personal computing), because, after six months of working with Linux on my web server, I had realized that Slackware 10.0 was superior to Windows XP.

I haven't looked back.

Thanks for supplying the link: https://switchtolinuxdesktop.wordpress.com/

i also partially diagree.

i had been installing windows XP onto discarded laptops for a couple of years alread -then i started using blackbox for windows - and only some time after that did i switch to Linux.

people often say there's a rift between linux users and windows users, but i disagree.
the rift does not coincide with the operating systems involved.
it's more about the type of user:

• power user (will go through all system settings and install any kind of point'n'click software to improve their UX)
• tinkerer (likes to dabble in the nuts & bolts of their system to achieve all sorts of things) - that's me btw, i see myself as a hobbyist
• coder/sysadmin etc. i.e. a professional in IT
• another type of professional: publisher, graphic designer etc.

of course there's a lot of overlap between these "types", but they can all be found in all operating systems.

So much would be won if people stopped thinking about operating systems as "everything non-Windows is Linux".