Comment 1743 for bug 1

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 8:03 AM, Graham <email address hidden> wrote:
> You are basically saying it's better to stay with the devil you know.

I did not want to say, that I find it better to stay with the devil I
know - that's the behaviour of the users (regardless what the users
say, that's the behaviour I observe.

> I disagree because my experiences are not like yours.
> Firstly, I never recommend removing a users current installation and
> leaving them with something they are unfamiliar.

I always help them a lot in the beginning - I don't leave them alone.
However, of course, it is the unfamiliar thing in the beginning.

> I always set up machines to dual boot and leave them with the option to
> go back to their existing installation.
> This has a very high switchover rate, since they can compare one to the
> other and find the Linux installation is far more reliable and
> dependable.

I never do dual-boot installations - tried it a few times and it is
additional complexity added. However, maybe I should try your way of
offering the dual-boot.

> I talking about housewives, psychiatrists, clergymen, plumbers, care workers.
> These are the people I have deployed to and they do not look back.

I cannot say that I have such a wide-spread target audience. I think
there are two types of "normal users": Those who are interested in
computers and do more than just email and web-surfing and those who
are not. The latter is usually no problem to migrate. - However, this
is always home users somehow where in general is less problematic. The
problems arise when you have people who are e.g. working as
freelancers and need to communicate a lot with other companies.

>From your post, it seems you actually do not have any Linux experience to compare.

Oh I have several different experiences: I do manage the server at a
very small company (3-4 people) and I helped migrating users with less
and with more IT knowledge. - Far not so many as you - I think, but
enough to know the pitfalls, as I can look back also to a few failures
also (failure in the sense, that people did not continue to use Ubuntu
or still use it for particular tasks only).

I myself are facing the biggest hurdles as I am running my Ubuntu in a
Windows-only environment in the office where whole IT department is
fully Microsoft-conform.

Just to make it clear: I do not want to say, that Linux or Ubuntu is
failing. It's just that I am experiencing more issues during the last
months than before. So this is, why I don't even understand the
efforts put into discussions of shopping lenses and the like - such
things are worth discussing and implementing when everything else is
running fine.