Often times, when dealing with Linux incompatibility with hardware and software, there are workarounds, but I’ve frequently found that the underlying issue is the low percentage of people using Linux over other alternatives. What are some long-term oriented causes I can support, either financially, politically, or with my time, that show real promise of growing the prevelance of Linux desktop users?
Not a concrete answer, but for me and several others in this distro hopping lemmy thread, a gateway drug into adopting linux was running a VM on a traditional OS. Perhaps identify groups which promote VM trials would be one approach.
Another gateway seems to be use of linux recovery disks where users boot into linux to recover data on a broken installation.
There may or may not be opportunities to expand reach of those providing these solutions.
I’m not sure what you mean by “long-term oriented causes”, but a good choice might be longtime distributions like Debian, since any good distro will spend a lot of time packaging and patching applications to play nice together. After all, one of the drivers of adoption is just making initial use of the operating system as easy as possible.
You could also investigate organizations like GNOME or KDE that also put a lot of work into developing user-friendly programs and toolkits.
That was along the lines of my thought process too. I’ve been giving to KDE, Canonical, and Kubuntu in that spirit. I just wonder if there are any groups out there being proactive about growing the user base. It could be something a little out of the box, like getting Linux into the hands of kids at school computer labs. another thought I had was supporting manufacturers like System76 that are distribing Linux compatible setups in a convenient way.
I remember this organization that tries to get laptops into the hands of kids and I think that the laptops have Sugar on them, although I’m not sure. Could look into that.
I appreciate the tip, I’ll look it.
