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Jay Baker

@Mux @hazelnot @afewbugs I teach tech, mostly to folks who tend to be older and less confident. The most common response to this proposal tends to be around the fact that, ironically, they trust big tech companies more, even if they hate them; if it's free - many assume - then it must also be worthless. They struggle on with a clunkier, more confusing Windows operating system because of this, when they could be using an OS more comparable to the one many of them use on their phone (essentially a free, open source OS with a simple software centre). I agree that we cannot underestimate the mass marketing of Microsoft that promotes their inferior product. I remember mentioning this challenge to folks who work on Linux, who told me "We don't have time or money to do publicity, we're busy working on creating a better OS." There's the rub!

4 comments
Jules

@MediaActivist @Mux @hazelnot that's a fascinating point that the boomer generation in particular seems to trust corporations more than the alternative, which feels a bit perverse. My Mum for example prefers to eat supermarket vegetables and won't eat vegetables from the local farm box scheme or even the neighbour's garden because "you don't know how they grew them"! They do seem to believe corporate stuff has to meet certain standards of safety or something

Mux2000

@afewbugs
Well, tbf, Linux does come with NO GUARANTEE OF USABILITY OR FIT FOR PURPOSE, so there's that.
@MediaActivist @hazelnot

Mu

@MediaActivist @Mux @hazelnot @afewbugs my father in law is older, and when someone from Grey Power showed him Ubuntu, he was a near instant convert!

The things which appealed were the slowness of UX changes, and the fact that it ran pretty well on old hardware.

A land fit for all our futures

@MediaActivist @Mux @hazelnot @afewbugs maybe I'm inured to it, but successive updates to my Windows 11 machine have caused only brief issues, unlike the irritations compounded by successive Android updates on my phone, which is steadily losing functionality (fingerprint login now disabled for some apps, return to home screen no longer works from recent apps view, ...)

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