I do not try to motivate people to 'switch to Linux' even though Ubuntu is the only OS I use (apart from ChromeOS on my Chromebook and Android on my phone).

In my experience of using Ubuntu full time in the workplace for a decade or so nobody has seen me fix their problems with Linux world tools and thought 'must give Linux a go'. Instead they stick with what they know, on their PCs or Apple boxes.

I have never been evangelical about Linux, however, what I do is fix people's problems. Some of these can be very basic, for instance, how do you merge a big long list of email addresses and remove the duplicates in a spreadsheet program? Well, that is doable but if the task is part of a bigger task then you just want to get that done instantly, i.e. before the spreadsheet program loads... In linux world you can just do a 'sort -u' after concatenating your files with '>>'. Easy if you have muscle memory for 'vi', not easy if you have to hunt around for menus and stuff with a mouse in one of those 'graphical user interfaces' people speak so highly of.

So you can do this stuff before people's eyes, explaining what you are doing and keeping focused on the bigger task at hand, e.g. sending out a newsletter in the above example. But does anyone want to do it 'programmer' instead of 'user' style after being shown how much quicker and accurate the 'programmer' way is? Nope!!!

With anything to do with images there is a similar problem. Time consuming 'artwork' tasks such as cropping lots of images and compressing them for the web can be done one of two ways. As a 'user' one can open Photoshop and spend all day moving a mouse around doing things very much by eye. Or you can just do it near instantly with a simple script on a 'linux' box. In terms of speed this is the difference between taking a steam boat across the Atlantic or just getting on a plane, hours and days of work are saved. But would a 'graphic designer' think to do it linux style? Even if they could do it with homebrew style things? Nope, never. Doing it 'programmer style' could free them up from boring tasks so they could spend more time doing whatever it is that they are notionally passionate about. But they do not want to know.

In fact, even to get a frontend developer to open up a terminal window is a bit of an ask. There are people that use 'grep' and there are people that use 'gui' for everything.

I am not convinced that linux ports to Apple or PC environments are any good. My colleague uses 'MAMP' and that ties you in to doing things the GUI way, e.g. typing 'mysql -u me -pWhatever database < latest.sql' will give 'command not found'. Yes but you could add wherever MAMP hides stuff to the path and blah, but it is half baked. The speed of the thing is slow too, even if the linux version is on a legacy PC and the MAMP stack is running on some £1500 brand new machine. Don't get me started on developing a simple web page (e.g. Wordpress) on a Windows PC, in my mind it is as bad for kludges as the Mac dev environment.

I also have problems knowing what is really that good about these OSX/Windows programs that are vital to have. I can't open a 'Visio' drawing on my linux box but there is only one guy in the office with licensed Visio anyway, so it is not as if anyone else can open those things. I don't believe there is an open source tool for everything, give me a proper CAD or 3D modelling tool over some 'Blender' effort any day. But most stuff, linux is far superior as far as a toolchain that works.

The most amusing one at the moment for me is printing. My linux box just prints fine to those HP printers in the office that nobody ever seems able to print to. So whenever someone wants something printed urgently, it is me who does it for them. 'Look no drivers'!!!

Despite these positives (linux to my mind is much better for solving normal problems like getting stuff printed out), there is nobody wanting a linux box like mine. They all stick to what they know (as do I in my special way).

To take a dietary analogy, it is much better to be a quiet vegetarian rather than one of those annoying vegans who has to tell you about it every time they fart. A quiet vegetarian has no moral superiority, does not make people feel bad about the death of the planet and animal suffering, just has a personal choice that works for them and expects nobody to change their life long habits.