Most people don’t care, they won’t even notice sadly. They will walk into Best Buy, get swarmed by 3 sales people, tell them, “I’m looking for a new laptop.”

And the sales people will take them straight over to the laptop section which is all filled with the latest Microsoft swill and sell them one of them.

There will be no discussion of privacy, no discussion of Microsoft’s recent scandals, no discussion of alternatives. They will parrot whatever Microsoft’s talking points are, “it’s safe, encrypted, secure, fast, etc…”

If we want consumers to care, we have to reach them before they buy their new upgrade. This often starts with your family and close friends. You need to inform them, you need to tell them there is a better way.

This is how I got my parents switched from Windows 10 to Linux. They were asking me to help with their computer problems, (10 year old computer that was pretty low-power when it was new.)

I told them that Windows 10 was EoL next year and their hardware was way to old to upgrade. I said that I could put on Linux which would be much faster, more secure and private, wouldn’t require a new computer, and would do everything they needed. My mom was nervous, but I went over everything her and my dad used it for, (browsing, email, Word and printing, PDF reading, Turbo Tax, and Spotify.)

Only slight pain point was getting my mom onto Turbo Tax cloud. But she is slightly tech savvy, so it wasn’t too bad.

They’ve been on it for about 9 months now and it works great. Their computer is much snappier, and I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, (my dad is 0% tech savvy and will click on almost any link he sees.)