The people whose brains are not fried by dual booting should be dual booting and moving the platform steadily forward to reduce the excuses for the people whose brains are fried by dual booting.

So basically you want me to setup dual boot, teach, offer free support for the rest of their lives, for every person that I know? Because that's the only group who could do what we are talking about.

Or maybe you want me to convince them they should pay someone else to do that because Stallman was right.

I'm sure some people are lucky enough to have friends and family who would accept your values instantly, learn the setup easily and be glad to pay someone else to do it. I can only speak from my own experiences and they don't reflect that (and as much as I might make a comment here and there I won't ever again try to push "my values" down someone's else throat).

Did you even read my comment?

I did and that reply is based on me not believing a few "coders" will make year of the Linux desktop ever happen. So if you need Linux: it won't be viable alone in the near future (I'm talking about Linux offering everything Windows users need, like commercial software and AAA games so they don't need anything else) for the non tech savvy person and dual boot is also not an option in most cases unless there's some technical person "sponsoring" the whole deal. Either paid or not.

> So basically you want me to setup dual boot, teach, offer free support for the rest of their lives, for every person that I know?

Do you handle all of their Windows-related technical issues?

Are they incapable of learning to do it themselves?

Really?

Are you absolutely sure?

It's all-too-common for people to become dependent on technically-minded friends/family like us, but the fact is that it really isn't difficult for them to do it themselves.

The main barriers they face are:

1. I haven't done this before.

2. I don't immediately see the benefit.

What it comes down to is self-reliance. We can teach people to rely on themselves instead of rely on us.

As the saying goes:

> Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

... something like that, anyway.

People don't want to feel dumb (or don't want to learn too much Computers so they aren't Nerds) so they find excuses and don't want to use anything "complicated". And good people don't want to abuse your time. That's my real life experience, maybe on the internet it's not the same.

For thinkers, problems are an opportunity to learn. Others, they don't see it that way, they want things to just work without making them think. If anyone you're trying to "teach" and "show them the way" ever loses money or have any kind of non trivial issue because "your linug broke my microsoft access" you'll be forever the guy that broke his computer. And he'll hate Linux forever.

"Yes nana, you just have to install linux-headers first"