Wouter Verhelst: Conversion in progress http://www.grep.be/blog/2006/10/24#conversion_in_progress
Excerpt: Sometimes the things you want don't happen until you stop trying so hard.
For as long as we've had Intel-compatible computers here at home, my parents have been running Windows. At first I didn't care—this was before I had even heard about Linux, let alone install it—but as I became more and more involved in Linux, I wanted more and more for them to make the change, too. Especially given how I'm still supposed to be responsible for making sure their machine keeps running; if I wasn't, I wouldn't care as much.
These are the approaches I've taken to try to convert them, and why they failed:
These are the approaches I've taken to try to convert them, and why they failed:
I had my mom running red hat 5 for a year or two; occasionally she would have a problem and page me. Once I did such an "urgent customer support" session at a pay phone in a cinema. The machine had the gnome desktop, and I fondly recall recalling my windows technical support training when I started every thing that she was supposed to do to fix her computer with the instruction "Click on the foot."
Telephone support based on gnome desktop was essentially the same as windows-95 telephone technical support.
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Yesterday morning I paid for a body shop repair on my van with my "linux fund" credit card, which is an MBNA charge card with a very cute tux on it. The clerk recognized "linux the penguin" and asked me what linux was, but glazed over when I tried to explain what an OS does.
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Chris Bier -
David Nicol