67
Over the past month, I've put Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" on 4 machines and all the owners are happy (with one of them being me) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Some of these machines literally took 5 minutes to get from boot to watching a YouTube video, and now they can do so in a fraction of that time.

I'm super-interested in helping people reduce e-waste in my community now, and am wondering about how to go about advertising my willingness to help strangers restore their old/slow/Win11-ineligible machines. I wish I got over the fear of OS-wiping years ago!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 8 points 10 months ago (6 children)

You can organize Install Parties! I held two of them and I expect to hold one more in the beginning of the year, I had a lot of fun and people were happy to install themselves and learn a new way to use their computers.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Would you be willing to share advice on how to make this happen and any promotional stuff (flyers etc)? I've been wanting to do this in my local area but am not sure how to publicise it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

    I organized it in a third place (not sure about how it's called in English, "tiers-lieu" in french), they did most of the communication. I also gathered e-mails of people interested on foss and related subjects during other events and I send them e-mails everytime I throw an event.

    There are some initiatives like End of 10 which gather local organizations that might throw install parties, that can help being visible. There are probably others but it depends on where you are.

    On the practical level, we prepared a quick slideshow that we run in the beginning to show people why they'll love linux (talking about free software philosophy, and why proprietary is not a good idea) and then we have half a dozen Linux mint keys that we share with everybody and we all run the install at the same time.

    We also bring a couple more keys, like a gparted and/or debian live just in case we need to do some recovery.

    Most of the people completely switch from windows to Linux but we had a couple of dual boot. We also had one impossibility due to the person wanting a dual boot and their PC using a weird RAID controller preventing us to repartition the disks, or install grub, I don't remember.

    Anyways, it has been a lot of fun and I recommend anyone competent to try, it's really nice to bring linux to more people!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    That's great, thank you :) Yes, it is "third places" in English. Do you still have access to the communications they sent out as well as your slideshow? I have graphic design skills and I can read French well enough to reformulate them. Merci!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •