Persistence, willingness to learn or open curiosity, and responsibility.

Persistence because sometimes when learning things, you’ll run into problems and will need persistence yo overcome them.

Willingness to learn or open curiosity because otherwise you’re in a rut and inflexible which makes learning differences between Win/Mac and Linux almost impossible or at least much harder.

Responsibility because you are in charge of your system and your laptop/pc. You need to take responsibility for learning how to do things, solving problems, doing updates, etc.

Sadly, these days people lack most of these qualities. So many people want things handed to them on a silver platter or to have their hands held and told exactly how yo do something instead of working it out for themselves. And people don’t want responsibility - they want someone else to be responsible, someone else to blame and someone else to do the thinking.

A lot of Linux adoption won’t change until there’s also a culture shift :/

“I want to know why this is broken. How to fix it can come later.”

Mine was a final straw with Microsoft and a determination to learn. Thankfully linux mint is pretty user friendly and I haven’t really ran into issues yet

Mine was that I hate corporations. That’s it. That’s literally all that I needed to figure out Linux.

Willingness to independently learn and the capacity to let the frustration roll off of you. You will occasionally want to bang your head against the wall, but give yourself the grace to learn.

Back in the mid 2000s, we (my company) were on Windows, including three Windows 2000 Server licences. And we needed to upgrade. But it wasn’t sustainable for the small company to pay for all these licences, when a free option was available.

So we slowly moved all applications over to cross-platform alternatives, Outlook to Thunderbird (called Firebird in those days), office to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), Internet Explorer to Firefox, Corel Draw to Gimp, Company software like accounting to a XAMPP stack etc.

Once this was established and running well, we just changed the underlying platform from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, cursed for a few days and went on with our lives. And it worked for the past 20 years and counting. Now I am cursing, when I am forced to use Windows and can’t find my butt using it.

So the mindset, if you want, was that of methodical planning and going slow, step by step. This is likely different if you’re a gamer, or you need some very specialised apps, but for me, this was not the case. The games that I play, like Sudoku and Solitaire, work on any platform.

You have to want to use FOSS software. If you want to use certain proprietary applications then buy the commercial platform they run on.

The other is interest and ability to solve your own tech problems.

Keep in mind there are a lot of ways to start. Install it in a VM, buy hardware with Linux installed, or install it yourself.

i guess convenience seekers can have linux these days. ppl don’t care for the os, only for “the programs” they “need”. i was agnostic to e.g. office suites (i hate em from the bottom of my heart) long before i considered trying a switch. that helped, i guess. a feature, that can only be reproduced with a certain version of licensed software is fundamentally bullshit.

i wish people hadn’t told me abt dual boot but using wine properly (or running a vm?). for windows will fuck up your boot section and that’s very scary the first time, alone.

the only problem i see, is the upcoming dependency on copilot … just leave those ppl be.

instead teach the willing some fundamentals:

• piping ps through grep and use kill is not intuitive for the windows user.
• the packaging system the distro comes with (idc, just call it ‘the appstore’).
• show them software, there are ppl who arent aware, how e-mail works, and that you can have “your outlook in thunderbird or whatever”
• show them how to find solutions, and teach them how to read the shell commands they’ll find. (+ the jokes abt rm … they dont need to understand it all, but be sceptical before running any 3 lines found on the net.)
• …
• really, its usually abt games. they come from steam. they got proton. teach ppl how to use steam! (and only after that tell them not to buy software that doesn’t run on linux natively!)

I think a “fuck it we ball” attitude helped me a lot in my jump. I didn’t even bother researching what dual-booting was to give myself a backout option.

Lots of good answers already. I think one of the biggest factors is to not be the kind of person that succumbs to choice paralysis. There are always going to be a multitude of options for every problem. Learning to live with the idea that the best solution to a problem is not the only acceptable solution will go a long way to keep from getting frustrated in linux.

I have a “I will not ever go back to Windows” mindset and I think that helps. If I fuck up my system to the point it’s not immediately fixable, I have a separate /home partition so I can wipe / and start over without worrying too much. I look for answers to fix things on my phone when my system is inaccessible so I’m not stuck.

I am really not a Linux expert, but I was a Windows power user and I like to fix things myself and understand the basics of why it broke.

Dogged stubbornness. I use Linux because I refuse to give MS any more of my money, and I’m too stubborn to give up.

Id say it’s the mindset of the experienced linux user that matters.

If you’re willing to tell a person, “if you run into trouble, call me”, and then follow up when they do, half the fight is over.

Most people, they try it and it’s fine, as long as the basics are there. You show them where the browser and email are, set up desktop shortcuts to important stuff, and answer questions, and they’ll eventually not even think about the fact that it isn’t windows.

But the first time they run into trouble, and you can’t give them an answer in a reasonable amount of time, they blame Linux, because they forgot how long it took them to figure out windows originally, and aren’t willing to look things up even if that’s what they did when they ran into a Windows problem.

So, you gotta play tech support for a while if you’re the one introducing them.

You aren’t going to change mindsets inside someone else in any realistic timeframe.

The most effective motivation is intrinsic. It’s very hard to make someone want to do something. It’d take Apple-level marketing, or Microsoft-level outright paying people to use their products.

Linux isn’t a product sold by a company. If they’re still thinking that somebody else is responsible for how they experience their technology they will not have a good time with Linux. You have to be able to take responsibility for your machine, and in our society of learned helplessness, people would rather give up that responsibility for perceived convenience.