 I hear the story all the time from Linux users, or new to Linux users especially. They switch from Windows to Linux. They're excited to make the switch, to finally give Linux a try. And they run Linux for a few weeks or a few months, and then they become frustrated. They become angry. They become disillusioned, disenfranchised. Linux wasn't what they thought it was going to be, and they quit. They just totally quit Linux, and they go running back to Windows. And why does this happen? Well I think part of the reason this happens, some of it is psychological. And by psychological what I mean is, these people that switch to Linux, sometimes they are living in imagination. They imagine Linux is going to be something that it's not, right? And then when they come over to Linux, and it's not at all what they thought it was going to be in their head. You know obviously, that's when they become frustrated and angry. And a lot of this can be attributed to something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm sure you guys are familiar with Dunning-Kruger. I've got a chart here that I can pull up here. You guys have probably seen this posted all over the internet, because all of a sudden here in the last say two years or so, everybody brings up Dunning-Kruger effect all the time. I guess it's a social media thing. You know how social media is, where every month there's new hot buzzwords people love to use. And all of a sudden a couple of years ago I saw everybody just throwing out this Dunning-Kruger effect for everything, you know, to describe practically everything in places where it really doesn't belong. But for the topic of today's video, the Dunning-Kruger effect actually is pretty applicable because I think this is part of the reason so many new to Linux users get frustrated and quit and go back to Windows. So for those of you that are not familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, let me move my head out of the way, basically we have this chart, we have our X and Y axes here. And this axis here is the confidence axis. So we go from low confidence to high confidence. And on this axis we have competence, and we go from low competence to high competence or expert competence, right? So it's confidence versus competence. And what happens is when you first learn about a topic or a subject, you first become interested in something. Most people have an over-inflated sense of confidence and competence, right? This is this point here. You first learn about something and you just skyrocket all the way to this point here. And what this is, is hubris, right? You imagine that you actually know more about the topic than you really do. I mean you just learned about it. And all of a sudden you feel like, you know what, I know enough I'm already an expert. I know what to expect. I know what I'm getting into. So for the topic of today's video, let's imagine you just found out about this wonderful operating system that is Linux. And you spent a few weeks reading up about it. You see it on web forms. You watch a few YouTube videos by content creators like me and many other Linux content creators. And then maybe you tried out a live USB stick of Linux. Or maybe you've played around with Linux in a virtual machine. And all of a sudden, you know what, I know what that thing's about. So let me go ahead and install it on physical hardware, on my main production machines, and let me try it out. And quickly, you know, now the graphs start swinging this way because Linux is not what you thought it was at all, because you really didn't know what Linux was until you actually really use it, until you actually have experience with it. You know, this again was just hubris. Now you start using it and it's not quite what you thought it was, right? Now all of a sudden you're thinking, wow, this Linux thing, this is harder than I thought it was. I'm running into all of these problems. I'm finding these roadblocks on occasion that I just did not expect to be here. And then at some point, you know, the pain points with Linux really start piling up as you swing low here until you get to this point here. This is the low point. This is the valley of despair or the valley of hopelessness. This is where, you know what, you're certain that this is, this Linux thing is horrible. You can never make this work. It's just too hard for you to play with, to understand. You know what? I have to run back to Windows and this is the quitting point. So this low point on the Dunning Kruger graph here, that is where people quit, right? They get to that absolute bottom and that's where they decide to quit. But here's the thing. They just not quit. Look what happens to the graph after that. It starts swinging back up, right? And this is why everything in life, you know, you should never just quit something in life because if you just stick with it, because what this graph is demonstrating is with enough time, you know, this valley of despair, this valley of hopelessness, all of a sudden start sloping up, right? Now this upward slope is a slope of hope because all of a sudden you start gaining more confidence and more confidence to where now you start feeling like you're in flow with the subject, like you actually are starting to understand this. And you actually kind of surprised that you had so many pain points along this way because now you're realizing, hey, this wasn't as hard as I thought it was. And if you stay with it long enough, eventually you get to this point to where this is no longer incompetence, hubris, this is no longer thinking you actually know stuff you actually don't know. Now you actually do know the subject. Now you've actually mastered it. Again, if you just stick with it long enough. Now, of course, everyone that quits Linux to go back to Windows, they're not suffering from this Dunning-Kruger effect, right? Some people have used Linux for many years. I know all about Linux and they have to go back to Windows for job reasons or school reasons or specialty niche proprietary software reasons as software that doesn't exist on Linux kinds of reasons. But a lot of people, especially the ones that use Linux for a very short period of time and go back to Windows, they just run back to Windows. A lot of those fall into this Dunning-Kruger trap where, you know, they came to it all wrong. They imagined Linux was one thing and in their imagination, right? Because they imagine Linux is this and they know this imaginary Linux that they're thinking of. They of course think they're an expert. It's actually kind of natural to think you're an expert at something when you imagine it's something because obviously what you imagine, you know. So you imagine things like Linux never breaks, right? Maybe you didn't imagine that. Maybe people on the internet told you so. But certainly people do imagine things like, you know, they hear how great Wayland is, you know, some of the Wayland desktop environments and compositors and things like that. So some of these new to Linux users these days are trying some of these Wayland stand-alone window managers and they're not what they thought they would be because they're very beta kind of software, kind of buggy, kind of, you know, experimental kind of software and they're running into all these issues and they don't understand because Wayland was supposed to be the future. That's what people were telling, well, no, that's not what, if you'd actually did a little more research, you would know that there were gonna be some pain points along the way or maybe I've seen this with software developers, a project dies. A very popular software project dies and somebody decides, I'm going to take this project and fork it and it's going to be reborn again because other people like me are going to join along the way and we're all gonna do this wonderful thing where we take this very complicated piece of software and we keep it going and we even improve on it and, you know, patch it and things like that and that almost never happens again because people live in imagination, right? They imagine this utopia thing that was supposed to happen and really, does that happen? And you just have to be careful living in imagination but really, this video is for the new to Linux user because I know a lot of you guys are gonna be watching this video. You haven't been using Linux for very long and you're running into issues. You're running into these pain points. You're getting a little frustrated, maybe a lot frustrated, maybe you're getting to the point where you're actually angry and you're angry at Linux and you want to run back to Windows, what should you do? Well, let's take a look at the graph again because the graph makes it pretty obvious what you should do, right? If you're wanting to quit, chances are you're at the bottom of the graph because that is the point of despair, the point of hopelessness. So you're probably already at the absolute worst part of your Linux experience. You're at it right now. So all you have to do if you're at the bottom of this graph is just stick with it because things are about to turn up and turn up quite quickly. So just keep going, all right? The solution here is just to keep giving it a little more time because right now, the reason you're feeling despair, you're feeling hopelessness is because you're just not smart enough. Smart's not a good word because that signifies maybe you're not intelligent enough. This isn't an intelligence problem. This is a wisdom problem. It's an experience problem. You just haven't been at it long enough. So again, just keep at it. Just keep going. If you keep going, you are going to feel better, right? Because this point is just a little bit further down the road and eventually you get to this point to where not only do you feel better, but you're happy. You are glad you stuck with this and you'll get to the point where you can't imagine running anything but Linux. You can't imagine ever going back to Windows. That's where many long-time Linux users are. We can't imagine using a different operating system. So cheer up a little bit. If you're thinking about quitting, just know it's kind of a normal thing, right? That's not unusual. That's not a negative mark on you in any way that we all go through this kind of thing, not just with Linux, but with every task, every topic of life, everything, every endeavor that we undertake. We have this dip and then we come back up again. Just stick with it. Just keep going. Now before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. And of course I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Paul, Steve West, Armoredragon, Commander Angry, George Lee, Matthew, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archimoud, or Reality's World Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solastry, Tulsa, Dealer, Wardji, N2, and Ubuntu, and Willie, these guys, they're my high-steer patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about people wanting to quit Linux due to the Dunning-Kruger effect. It would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. If you like my work, I'm gonna see more videos about Linux, free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.