So apparently a lot of people are mad enough at some Windows thing to be contemplating Linux (again), and there is (justifiable) concern that this will mostly end in tears, because people who are forced to use something are likely to resent and hate every moment of it.
I'm in the frustrating position of a long-time Linux enjoyer who is a computer toucher *but also* really mad about the widespread acceptance of the idea that you have to have some kind of special aptitude to use a computer as something other than an appliance, because technology is scary and complicated (and that therefore there's no hope of mere mortals coping with the rough-around-the-edges here-be-dragons environment of even the most user-friendly distro).
I think this is a harmful idea, originally popularised by people who profit from selling appliances, regularly disproved by ordinary people who teach themselves how to get the computer to do cool stuff because nobody told them that they can't because it's too hard. And as much as I don't want to discourage anyone from learning stuff on whatever OS they have right now, this is not an OS-agnostic issue.
It genuinely makes a difference whether your environment is a proprietary black box that allows you limited access to its workings, or something that you can take apart and look at and modify. You may not *understand* all of what you're looking at, but you can ask someone who does! And maybe that someone is an asshole who won't help you, or maybe it's three people who are going to argue about it. The point is that it's *possible*. This is *knowable information*.
However... I realise that a lot of the people who are currently fed up with Windows 100% believe that they are just "not technical", and I think that the worst possible time to try to encourage anyone to step out of their comfort zone and learn something new is when they have to, because the thing they actually want to use is broken. They don't want platitudes; they just want a computer that fucking works, just like their old computer.
