Right now their page https://upgradefromwindows.com/ just redirects to https://www.fsf.org/windows which has a wall of text and an infographic. Even I, who doesn’t have windows and will never reinstall it unless forced, clicked away from the page within 5 seconds. The FSF desperately needs help with marketing and design, plus it would be great to have tooling for brain-dead linux installation (no, find distribution, backup, put linux on a USB-stick, reboot, hit some button to get into the BIOS, select “USB stick”, reboot, click through installation, find alternative software, is not brain-dead).
The page starting with a popover donation call doesn’t help either…
These websites are really bad, I really don’t understand why many of these websites that invite people to Linux fail to understand the user that would browse something like this. It straight up links to the GNU website to browse distros and software, which by the way, isn’t loading as of writing this comment.
This entire website talks about ditching Windows without an obvious call to action. Windows is bad, yes, but giving people a list of every distro under the sun and saying “good luck” won’t convince anyone to switch. Give obvious beginner recommendations. Tell people to install Linux Mint, and a beginner-friendly guide on HOW, and why Linux is good rather than just convincing everybody to stay on Windows 10.
@fsf@hostux.social I hope you’re still active. I think this is hard but necessary feedback. How can people contribute to improving your page?
IMO, the FSF unfortunately probably shouldn’t lead this campaign. They only endorse purely-FOSS systems, and that’s not realistic in the short-term future for most Windows users.
The FSF to me seems to be a predominantly ideological organisation, with little practical consideration
They do make a ton of practical contributions to open source development. But on the stuff they push beyond what the Open Source Consortium pushes, they should campaign those purities to intentional communities, not the general public.
Honestly, I have the greatest hope in Valve for getting users away from Windows. The best way to get more users to adopt Linux is to have it preinstalled on their device. 2nd best option is to manage to brainwash semi-techsavvy users to swap over, and I’m hopeful SteamOS could do that once it’s properly released.
From there it’s hopefully going to get some more momentum to grow
So do you think this effort is wasted or that the energy should be redirected to something else?
Nah, the community effort has gotten us where we are now - just that Valve is our best hope at the moment for mainstream adaption
Linux still needs a lot of UX cleanup. Everyone has different ideas of how to make a desktop work and none of them are compatible with eachother.
Dependency hell is still a problem for some mainstream distros, especially since there are literally a half dozen package formats in use.
Arch is only easy if you actually know how linux works - if you’re a mundy, you will be lost trying to get and keep an Arch system running.
Don’t overestimate the tech abilities of the mundy pc user. The simple act of balena etching a usb stick may as well be brain surgery for most people, and they will have to do more complex fixes to keep their stuff running in Linux.
Make a proper accounting software replacement to Quickbooks that doesn’t require a linux degree to operate.
Integrate VR support apps into the distro pipeline. This is still so broken even the tech savvy may find it’s a roll of the die if it works.
Fix the tables in Libreoffice - converting Word documents is a nightmare if table formatting is involved.
Waydroid needs to integrate better as an app, and not just be a screen hogging full screen app. Also, brain surgery just to get Waydroid setup, and on an ancient version of Android at that (11).
Fix the thing with XFCE where it shows the desktop screen before locking it after waking up from sleep. Ths is several seconds of laptop security compromising peekaboo and it is a surprise it still isn’t fixed yet!
The Archiving app in LXqt and KDE I think as well has inverted option “preserve folder path when extracting” which should extract folders and subfolders in the archive when checked but nope, it dumps all the files without any folders wherever you extract it, which breaks a lot of things.
And so on…
and so on…
I agree with most of that, I think VR should be somewhere far below “fancy app launch animations” considering how niche it still is.
Chicken and egg. Also, do we need fancier launch animations? This eats into memory and performance. I already disable animations in Windows for this reason.
My point was VR has been the next big thing for at least 35 years. Dedicating resources to native support for VR is a waste, a bigger one than fancy animations.
In the past couple years, it’s improved radically since the “last 25 years” of that 35 year mark.
The page should just be a list of steps to switch. Each step should have very specific resources listed for if that step goes wrong. It should not give options. It should just have one distro, and say exactly what to install.
I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have something at the top listing a few scenarios where you’d have to stick with Windows.
Might dissuade people, but the list could be “smart” if you had checkboxes at the top that list activities the user currently does. Then the list would include steps to tell the user how to do that in Linux instead of Windows.
Not going to happen, FSF will never endorse distros with any blobs or proprietary software, not even in the repos, and most people don’t care about software freedom, but do care that their wifi card works
@fsf@hostux.social is @amon@lemmy.world correct? Or would you endorse such distros in the interest of getting people off of windows?
One of the major barriers for me to switching to Linux as my primary OS was a simple hardware limitation. I use a Logitech MX Ergo, and I spend much of my time in Discord voice chats. The open source driver for my mouse, Solaar, wasn’t able to be configured to properly hold down the mouse buttons that I use for push to talk. That, to me, is a complete deal-breaker.
I also haven’t yet spent the time to figure out JACK audio as an alternative to Voicemeeter Potato, which is another big hurdle, but if my push to talk doesn’t even work there’s little incentive to do that.
I’ll have to see if Solaar has been updated to get this functionality working yet. If it has, maybe I’ll give it another shot. I honestly would love to switch to Linux. I prefer it in a lot of ways, but short of learning to make a driver myself or code something to fill the gap, it’s a barrier I haven’t really seen a way around. There seems to be a fair bit of that with Linux in niche use-case scenarios, which is I think one of the major obstacles to more wide-spread adaptation.
But that’s true for any switch to any os. If you switched to macos you would have run into the same/similar issues. I’ve been using Linux for so long that simple things that are missing from Windows are annoying, like keeping a Window on top, or using the quick GNOME overview by throwing the mouse in the corner.
I think it’s a matter of letting go when you’re ready and create new habits, and not try to shoehorn in old habits. That’s general advice. Sometimes people just want Windows but without Microsoft’s privacy disaster, but Linux just is different. I’m talking in general, not specifically to your grievances @millie@beehaw.org 🙂
From what I have seen, FSF has their head so far up their own ass that there’s no point.
