Re: [OT] Debian advocacy for Smart but Scared People With Lives
On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 03:28:05PM -0400, William Ballard wrote:
> And I spent a month getting all Debian's eyecandy and hardware
> acceleration working. And mutt was ridiculous at first compared to
> Outlook.
You can say that again!!! It is funny as hell to look back at how
foreign it felt getting started with Linux and progams like Mutt. Hah!
Now I can't live without Mutt.
> Now of course, I see the world very differently
Me too....but I am tired of preaching about the beauty and freedom
of using Linux, and am confident it will continue to spread slowly
but surely. No question in my mind.
> but I just don't know how to make someone else motivated to make
> this leap of faith.
Well you can do what I did a few months ago. My brother needed a new
computer, so I told him about getting a Dell Poweredge with
no operating system. (no Microsft tax......score!!!!)
You can get a Poweredge for about $300 shipped with rebate and I have
bought at least 10 of them in the past. They make great workstations.
Anyhow, I made a deal with him and he did about 8 hours of carpentry
work on my house, and I installed Debian on the Poweredge for him.
Got him a beautiful KDE desktop with audio, networking, printing, etc....
He LOVES it!!!
He learned how to forward port 22 on his Linksys router so I can ssh
in and take care of business. I am now 300 miles away from him.
Just got his Kodak digital camera working for him via command like with ssh.
He loves the feeling of browsing the repository, picking out games and
educational tools for his kids, and having me install with apt-get.
He loves knowing that spyware is not getting installed with the
"freeware" software. He loves not having to worry about spyware and
viruses and browser hijacks with IE. He loves Firefox and Thunderbird.
Now he is bragging about it to all the other Cops at the Police
Department and they all want Linux desktops now.
Linux does not have the $Billions in marketing money that MS has,
but stories like mine happen every day around the world, and that
is why I am confident that the "leap of faith" you ask about,
will happen slowly and surely.
Andy
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