In this post I'll be referring to "GEEKS" quite a bit. This is not entirely disrespectful, I do appreciate all the work geeks put in, creating open source software. But like so many people transitioning from Windows to Linux I have come to view geeks as a bizarre sub-species of computer users who take a perverse pleasure in exerting their superiority over NEWBS (New Linux users - I am a newb)
Making the shift from Windows to Linux is neither massively difficult, nor is it entirely easy. It's a bit of both, but a lot of the information online is biased, or badly presented, or created by geeks who are sometimes making things harder than they need to be.
Possibly some computer geeks place a value on themselves that partly stems from being the only ones who understand the technology, so making them gatekeeper tech gods. Which they get a buzz out of.
Unfortunately this tends to mean that rather than making things easier for newbs by giving them simple instructions, they often give out incomprehensible instructions like "Just enter this simple command in Terminal". Their condescending tone of "this is all really easy" is infuriating and one of the main reasons so many newbs give up.
Geeks seem to be unwilling to accept that about 90% of people using computers are not other geeks, but regular people who want to have most, or even everything they do accessible through buttons and menus that they can click on.
Personally I like to do everything on my PC using my mouse, and am about as anti keyboard command as it's possible to be. The very word "type" totally turns me off. "Copy & paste" I can do if necessary, but not "type" What I actually want to see are the words "click on".
Life often plays out in strange ways, and I have brain damage to the left hemisphere of my brain, so am very right brain dominant, but I still use computers anyway, and even sometimes seem to end up trying to explain computer stuff to other non-geeks who just want some basic instructions.
My perspective from being a right brain computer user is a bit different to most of the people who are usually commentating on this stuff, so I imagine any actual geeks who see my posts might view me as a clueless idiot. Which I sort of am.
During the process of transitioning from Windows 7 (Yes, I am still using Win 7 in 2024) to Linux Mint, it has struck me that a lot of the information online is confusing rather than helpful, and I wish I could have read (Yes READ, not viewed endless badly done videos) web-pages that explained things in a way that made sense to me.
Here I'm attempting to leave some notes for my friends who at some point will be wanting to escape the clutches of Microsoft. Windows 11 is likely to be the final straw for a lot of people with it's obvious and intrusive spyware, so the end of Windows for non sheeple is looming close on the horizon. Linux is the only real option for anyone who wants to continue using a computer without selling their soul to the deep state. (Yes, Apple & Google are spying too)
As I've found from sticking with Windows 7 and refusing to use Windows 8 or Windows 10, it is possible to soldier on for years with an unsupported operating system, and I expect I'll keep using Windows 7 on some of my old laptops for years to come. But installing Windows 7 on more modern hardware is a pig of a job, mainly because sorting out drivers can be really tricky, and there are ever increasing problems with software no longer working properly.
I will probably do a post about some of the Win 7 work arounds, because Windows 7 is slowly gaining a cult following as the last relatively low spyware version of Windows. But Linux is the future and I think everyone who wants to use a computer with some degree of privacy is going to have to get the hang of it. So I'll do some more Linux posts attempting to clarify a few things.
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