And also because it’s a comfortable cover up for any kind of money saving stupidity. We don’t need proper requirements engineering, we’re agile. We don’t need an operations team we’re doing an agile DevOps approach. We don’t need frontend Devs, we’re an agile team you all need to be full stack. I have often seen agility as an excuse to push more works towards the devs who aren’t trained to do any of those tasks.

Also common problem is that still tons of people believe agile means unplanned. This definitely also contributes to projects failing that are just agile by name.

God from the bible. The whole book will just be a bunch of ancient stories nobody should care about anymore. Would be interesting to see what the world would be like without Christianity.

But it has to start speaking to them in the first place and I think OP was specifically looking for the “conversation starters”

Same thing with why do I need to pay someone to do maintenance my car, kitchen, AC, whatever works perfectly well.

Also why should we pay developers to do stuff like dependency upgrades and other maintenance or software just runs™

I remember it being like that already in 2014. The only thing especially annoying I remember was having to use optimus to manually switch between the “internal” Intel GPU and the dedicated Nvidia GPU to not run out of battery within an hour. But the whole set up thing was never an issue for me on Mint and Ubuntu even 10 years ago.

A lot of people did this at that company as well. But mainly my point was that it might be better to first get productive, or verify you can be productive with the OS you installed before you waste tons of hours configuring it in some obscure ways.

Especially since it was usually the ones straight outta university who did the fancy configuration, tons of alias, custom theming and so on stuff while most senior Devs using Linux just used default Ubuntu, Fedora or whatever installations. Something that just worked.

To a certain extent this is correct, especially if this person works or used to work an office job in the last let’s say 15 years. But even then what are the use cases of office suites at home, mainly writing letters and maybe for the slightly more tech literate something like logging personal finances in a spreadsheet. In case of writing a letter those files are usually printed and the spreadsheet are usually considered confidential data. These people rarely, if ever, share those files with anyone, so interoperability is likely not an issue.

I’m therefore convinced if you just guide those persons to e.g. libre office writer and just say that’s “The word” on this machine, they’re going to be fine with it. Also almost all of these people use webmail instead of mail clients so the absence of Outlook is usually also not a problem.

Imho this includes 90% of the 50+ years computer user that can be migrated to Linux this way. The “problematic” ones are the ones who know some stuff, like how to click by click import my mail account into Outlook 2016 and want their new computer to behave exactly the same way and will go bananas otherwise. If I encounter one of those in my circle of relatives who need help with their computer I usually just leave them with their windows 7 machines or whatever they’re using cause it’s not a battle worth fighting.

Once worked for a software company where we could run Linux on our machines if we maintained them ourselves and wouldn’t ask admins for support since they were only supporting the default windows installations. Right before Christmas new coworker joined, early twenties, got into a project that was apparently hard to get it set up locally, we told him get the project running and then spend time to configure your laptop the way you like it to be. Low and behold, he spends Christmas setting up and configuring some fancy desktop environment on Kubuntu, returns to work, shows off the fancy looks and within a week fails to get the project set up and everyone else in the project was using windows. So one week later he was back using windows and super pissed that he wasted like 5 days configuring his desktop. My heart is still bleeding for that poor guy :(

Exactly this.

I’ve seen “computer illiterate” folk using windows computers without properly working graphic drivers causing scrolling to look horrific or being limited to something like 1280x800 while owning a FullHD screen that I’m 100% convinced something like this doesn’t matter for most “normal” users.

The main issue for them is getting it installed in the first place. They buy a computer, turn it on, windows with all its bloatware is there and they use it. Would it boot to any kind of Linux desktop they would use this and most probably wouldn’t even consciously recognise that they aren’t using windows anymore.