Honestly for me it was starting Young. I can say wholeheartedly that if I hadn’t been working on operating Linux style systems in high school, there is no way in hell that if I tried starting it today that I would want to put myself through the hassle of not only learning it but also fixing it

So I’d have to say an energetic and perseverance and ambitious Style mindset

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!)

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

These are some rules of mindset I’ve given to others in the past when trying linux-based operating systems.

1. Don’t try to apply the same computing and productivity patterns you’ve learned from Windows. Don’t try to force Windows concepts onto Linux OS, you will confuse yourself and get frustrated.
2. If something doesn’t work the way you expect it to, doesn’t mean it’s broken.
3. Just because something doesn’t behave the same as in Windows, doesn’t mean it’s worse. It’s probably designed that way for a good reason.
4. If your daily work routine or gaming life revolves around the use programs developed specifically for the Windows platform, you’re gonna need to invest time and effort to try to recreate that in Linux. It may not even be possible to fully replicate it. And that’s not the fault of Linux, it’s not designed to be a drop-in Windows replacement.
5. Everyone has their own taste and preferences. Just like some people prefer driving a manual car and some prefer auto. If you try Linux and hate it, that’s okay, that doesn’t make you bad or wrong, but keep in mind that those who do prefer Linux are not weird or daft or wrong either.

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

Because I rather burn my computer than use win11, oh and I also rather flush my money in the toilet than buy apple’s products so Linux is the only real choice

It’s software that’s made by people for people. I think it’s kind of wild that you can get a full-featured operating system with no strings attached. Normally, if something is free it means that you’re the product, but this is not (seemingly?) the case with FOSS stuff.

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.

Patience. Same things will work differently than you’re used to, and that can be frustrating.

Also be really sure to help true beginners understand software centers and package managers. I’ve been helping a lot of young people use Linux for the first time this year. Even though I mentioned it the first day and remind them frequently, if for example I ask them to install Java, half of them will download installers from Oracle’s website or wherever.

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.