I'm going to write in defence of those techies (and then run for cover )

While I've admitted my novice status with Linux I'm no slouch when it comes to the hardware. For many years I ran one of the UK's leading hardware firms and tech journalists, among others, used to contact me for my opinions on the latest hardware. During that time I had some great employees - people who really understood computers and knew their way around any operating system. However, our company supported only Windows PCs. This is the way it worked:

Standard tech staff were paid well and were able to support customers operating Windows PCs. They had to be constantly retrained, kept up-to-date with which hardware conflicted with which other hardware, which versions of a particular driver were buggy, which BIOS settings caused problems with which hardware etc etc. It was a huge amount that they had to be kept up-to-date with and that information doesn't come in an Updates for Dummies book, it came from the constant testing and problem solving in our labs/workshops. It costed us enormous amounts of money. Per version of Windows! We often sold specialised PCs (security camera control centers, video editing switches, building environment control systems etc) that we were very, very specific about: You remove Win 2K from this machine and put something else on and you will blow your support contract out of the water. That's because it took several hundred hours to get a specific system working properly in a particular specified environment.

However, the same logic applied to home PCs. If you run a support desk you begin to realise that no matter how stupid you think customers can get they'll always surprise you by going one further. Training front line staff just to handle Windows problems was expensive enough. Add another £100,000 to train them all in Linux for the 3.5 customers likely to call in with Linux problems wasn't cost effective. If you do provide a great Linux support line and encourage customers to take up Linux you end up adding a massive bill to your support desk costs. It's cheaper to pay the full cost of each user's Windows licence than it is to provide them with Linux support! Bear in mind that a lot of these could have absolutely no experience dealing with Linux and many believe that it's entirely your job to get everything on their PC working 100%.

I suspect that a lot of the time when you run into techies who can't answer Linux questions, it's because the volume of calls doesn't justify the company spending money training them. It is frustrating but only a wider uptake of Linux will solve this problem.