I used to be of that mindset... I mean Slackware was my first distro way back when... like '95 or so. Anyway, the more I showed people Linux, the more I explained to them that I'll no longer be necessary to clean off viruses they kept getting on their Windows machines... it was great.

For a while.

Then the questions started coming in because they were poking around bits of the OS and/or lacking stuff they knew was only a double-click away in Windows, where most of those double-clicks meant a new virus, but I digress. This was the days before Ubuntu was as friendly as it is now...

Anyway, people that just treat computers as a tool to entertain them and they don't take the time to learn how to install, admin or even spell Linux (don't ask how many times my spellchecker was about to explode because of their misspellings), it hit me. You could liken these people to the same kind of folks that own a nice car but have never lifted the hood. These are the types that don't know how to change the oil, let alone service the car.

So after a while, I started being more tactical to whom I'd show Linux to. The questions lessened... those folks that I introduced to Linux started to ask better, more intelligent questions and later they started to tell me things that in some cases, even I didn't know - I don't play games really, so that was always a place I learned.

Now? My mother called me and told me that her Ubuntu Linux 10.04 machine that she built was running circles around her older Linux machine and she's kicking booty. Not bad for a person that has used Linux and computers only for the last couple of years.

But with that said... the aforesaid stories are tragic. Not all computer users are created equal, but they seem to be equally stupid when they don't know any better.