How is the usage of Ubuntu or even GNU/Linux in your social circle?

[aldais]

Hi folks,

I am wondering about how prevalent is the use of Ubuntu or even linux in your social circle, maybe family, school-mates, colleagues, or etc.

For my case, sad to say, so far NONE uses this great OS.
A lot even sneer as if using Ubuntu is a bad joke... Very sad.
There was this friend who laughed at the idea of using ubuntu but one day, he got a new DELL laptop with win 7 in it and it completely wrecked on the first day of arrival due to some partition error and I gladly come to his help and restore his BSOD'ed Dell with gparted to reformat the drive. I have never heard him laughing at my Maverick any more :D

How about you folks here? A lot of your friends or family members using ubuntu? Did you "convert" them or what?

[NightwishFan]

Well, I have a few friends who rely on it and began to use it full time when their Windows installations broke. I know a few people that use Linux that I did not tell them about it.

Most of my friends from high school that I got out of touch with, I talk to them recently, mainly use Linux. It must be popular with my age group.

[ilovelinux33467]

Only two of my friends at my school I have converted to Linux on their home computers. Actually at the start they always laughed at Linux but once they started running it they fell in love with it. They both started out with Ubuntu 8.04 (I started out on Ubuntu 5.04 :) ). Now all of us have Linux servers and clients (openSUSE/Debian/CentOS/Ubuntu) running at our houses. I am really happy I succeeded in converting them to Linux

My family is harder to convince so I gave up and just let them run Windows on their computers. However I told them if they ever start to dislike Windows they should try out some Linux distro :)

[jfreak_]

All my friends have heard about it, most of them use it as does my family

[zer010]

I only know of one person that uses Jaunty. He's a friend of family I met on FB. Other than that, I've gotten some to try it out but they back to Win. My dad wanted to use it, but it didn't do exactly what he needed with his printer/scanner. What apps I found were buggy and inconsistent so I told him that he ought to stick with Win for now. It might be different if he had internet access.

[Arelem_R]

My daughter converted to Ubuntu 10.04 about 6 months ago and loves it, she converted me to Ubuntu 4 months ago and I'm rapt.
I have 2 Ubuntu installations on 2 hard drives, the 40 gig hd is for testing apps and the large drive for daily use.
I use Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, Scribus, Skype, scanner, laser printer, geany, python, firefox, Chromium,Thuderbird and a lot of other stuff.
I have a pc, Gigabyte Mobo, nvidia GT8600 video card.

My daughter has a Dell laptop, 4 years old and does all her assignments in OpenOffice she has virtualbox and easily switches to xp when she needs Flash. She uses Blender and gimp for all her 3D animation.

[leviathan8]

Well, only my uncle uses rarely Linux, and nobody else from my friends circle.

[aldais]

Yeah to those that do not have so much linux friends it's quite sad. Me too.
I want to bring up one thing though, it seems that there are a lot of linux users that really really hate windows or osx to the point of being a zealot.

I also notice this on my windows friends who responded like a windows zealot when i mentioned that i use linux. Very sad that they sneer at the fact that i use ubuntu. Of course, i don't really care what they say because from time to time some of them will run coming to ask to mend their broken windows box.

What's more saddening is that A LOT OF my friends in school ( i am still in high school by the way), that never even heard about even Linux. Argh, and when i explained that it is an OS, similar to win or mac, but it's just free and open source. Upon hearing the word free they will usually start to doubt it's capability, dammit. I seriously think the world needs to know the beauty of FOSS.

[cammin]

Maybe 3 of them like linux, only 1 or 2 actually use it. One uses Redhat for a server, another one plays with CentOS in a VM because he wants to be in IT as a career.
About 5 of them had tried Ubuntu didn't but like it.
One of them hated linux, but found FreeBSD and is happy using it on his servers.

[desnaike]

My social circle is in the 40 to 60 age group, and they love using my computer when they visit it's smooth it's fast and looks so nice (u/kubuntu dual boot) they say, but it's to hard to learn I have to agree since most of them won't learn how to change the wallpaper on windows let alone anything else. So usage 1 me.

[drawkcab]

My social circle is in the 40 to 60 age group, and they love using my computer when they visit it's smooth it's fast and looks so nice (u/kubuntu dual boot) they say, but it's to hard to learn I have to agree since most of them won't learn how to change the wallpaper on windows let alone anything else. So usage 1 me.

I helped my ex girlfriend install ubuntu on her netbook and another female friend install ubuntu on her laptop. The rest of my friends are, generally speaking, using windows or switching over to apple.

[akand074]

I heard about Linux from my cousin. I was at his place once and saw him running Ubuntu. He showed me the desktop cube and I was like woh ! After that I installed it at home but only booted into it occasionally for the shear novelty of it. One day I got fed up with Windows and I shut it down and promised myself I would never log back into Windows on my desktop. I haven't since.

I had a few of my friends install Ubuntu on their laptops but I noticed that they never really used it. They just signed into it occasionally. One friend did use it as his primary OS I noticed though. Recently another on of my friends installed Ubuntu on his old laptop because it was running Vista and started running terribly slow and having a lot of issues and now that is his only OS on that laptop and he loves it. Though for the most part, there aren't many people I know that use GNU/Linux. Most people who are getting fed up with Windows are moving over to Mac. (I've noticed the woman to man ratio of Mac users has increased greatly). I think this is because Mac is really easy to use and very stable, you have Steve Jobs telling you everything to do with it so for people who just use their computer as a means to get particular basic tasks done it works great for them. Also most people don't even know about the GNU/Linux option. I'm sure some people would have liked it much better if they switched to GNU/Linux instead.

[sagarhshah]

Having moved back to Kenya last year I wasn't surprised that everyone in my social circle uses windows that also most of them using pirated versions.

I was probably the only one that uses ubuntu.

Well that changed when one of them busted his computer with a virus again!! Cue coming to me please fix my windows.
I refused and offered to install ubuntu on it for him.
He reluctantly agreed as he didn't want shell out money to get his computer fixed by those dodgy shops.

Anyways long story short its been 6 months and I've got 4 people onto ubuntu and they couldn't be more happier.
I don't try and force it on them. I offer to install it and support them for the first few months when they are learning to use it. If they decide to go back windows they are more than welcome to.