Linux needs to grow. Stop telling people it's 'tech-y' or acting like you're more advanced for using it, you are scaring away people. Linux Mint can be used by a senile person perfectly.
Explain shortly the benefits, 'faster, more secure, easier to use, main choices of professionals and free'. Ask questions that let you know if they need to dual boot, 'do you use Adobe, anti-cheat games, or Microsoft Office', 'how new is your computer', 'do you use a Mac'.
And most importantly, offer to help them install.
They don't understand the concept of distros, just suggest Linux Mint LTS Cinnamon unless they're curious.
That's it, spread Linux to as many people as possible. The larger the marketshare, the better support we ALL get. We can fight enshittification. Take the time to spread it but don't force it on anyone.
AND STOP SCARING PEOPLE AWAY. Linux has no advertising money, it's up to us.
Offer family members or friends your help or copy and paste the below
how to install linux: 1) copy down your windows product key 2) backup your files to a harddrive 3) install the linux mint cinnamon iso from the linux mint website 4) use etcher (download from its website) to put the iso on a usb flash drive 5) go into bios 6) boot from the usb 7) erase the storage and install 8) press update all in the update manager 9) celebrate. it takes 15 minutes.
edit: LET ME RE-STATE, DO NOT FORCE IT ON ANYONE.
and if someone is at the level of ignorance (not in a derogatory fashion) that they dont know what a file even is genuinely dont bother unless theyre your parents cause youll be tech support for their 'how do i install the internet' questions.
Things are about to get worse for onboarding those from other platforms. There’s been this massive push the last year to get every window manager to switch to Wayland & drop X11 support… meanwhile Wayland doesn’t support color profiles or color management (just sRGB). How are you going to convince someone with an awesome screen to drop down to sRGB? How will you convince someone with a poor screen that has been color calibrated to make it usable to go back to off colors? How do you expect content creators to migrate & still create content if they can’t have access to all the color tools they use in their workflow to come to Linux when Wayland won’t support them? A lot of Linux folk act like this doesn’t matter, but to a lot of people, a computer is a magic box that they interact with via a screen + keyboard + mouse, & if non-niche peripherals aren’t supported (which DCI-P3 is becoming the norm & saving a screen from a landfill can often be fixed to ‘good enough’ thru calibration), users will think it’s trash & unfinished.
The vast majority of people don't know what sRGB or DCI-P3 or color profiles are, or care about it. I understand that you may be frustrated about bad support, but it is just not that big of a deal for most people. That said, color management and HDR support for wayland is being actively worked on, and I wouldn't be suprised if it works better on wayland than X11 in a year or two. Also the distro suggested here (linux mint cinnamon) uses X11, not wayland. I agree with OP that we shouldn't scare people away from linux. Forcing people to have an opinion on X11 vs Wayland or color profiles, definately could scare them away.
I have used labwc (a really close equivalent to openbox) with great excitement with the exception of one thing.
Running a graphic application as a different user within a user's session is impossible. Even if a different seatd session is active for the 2nd user, wlroots refuses to draw anything as a different user than the one initiating the session.
It is a form of containerization for me that just requires x11
@noddy @toastal
I’m not anti-Wayland… I’m anti-saying-it-good-enough-when-the-featureset-doesn’t match. I know it’s being worked on & I’ve followed the work pretty closely for over 4 years fingers-crossed there would be less bike-shedding & having things come out in easy-to-digest phases instead of holding back the monolith that they are building.
Knowing sRGB vs. DCI-P3 vs. AdobeRGB might not be immediately known as marketing teams like to hide the names behind marketing terms, but users very much understand ‘this displays a more vibrant range of color’. The whole ASUS laptop line is basically banking on having these great, color-calibrated 100% P3 OLED panels up all the price ranges because when a casual buyer walks in a shop, that those dominates the showroom & will sell better because it’s easy to compare even at a distance without looking at the spec sheet or touching the device; users are also used to it because smart phones have followed Apple’s P3 lead & expect better from laptops & monitors where the market can actually cater to this crowd (which is great since for years it seemed it was only dominated by how many frames you could get for the gamer crowd). Folk are getting QD OLED & other such monitors / TVs which have support. Imagine you buy that monitor, looks great, then move to Linux & now it doesn’t--which will become even more obvious when HDR is more mainstream, as you definitely noted. You don’t need to know the names of every technology or how they work to have a validated ‘bad feeling‘ about something not working as intended.
x11 is still supporred by mint and realisrically will be for years???
The Mint team recently made experimental Wayland support available. Still very alpha but I don't think it will be years.