So the other day my boss brought over a computer for me to fix. Turns out he never partitioned this new hard drive he had installed. I fixed it but we didn’t have a copy of Windows around, so I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it. After years of subtle lobbying I’m switching the whole office to Ubuntu in a month or so, and thought it would be a good way for everybody to demo the new system. So I replaced the general use computer with this Ubuntu box. I didn’t say a word, just plugged it into the old monitor and keyboard and left it running. All day long I was expecting to hear complaints or confusion, but all I saw was Facebook, email, you know, use. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon when somebody asked “So, where are all my documents?” that I realized that not only was nobody worried about the using Ubuntu, nobody had even noticed.
First wean them off of IE
One caveat: About a year ago I banned the use of Internet Explorer in the office and made it hard to find all our computers. So everybody already knew that the little orange and blue firefox logo means “internet”, as opposed to the little e.
The moral
The moral of this story is that the average user does not give a crap about what operating system they use as long as they can do the stuff they want without thinking much.