"4. Have a machine up and running for users to play with Instead of pulling the rug from under your users with a sudden switch, make a machine available to them to experiment with. Set up this machine exactly as their desktops will look so they can see, first hand, that their future PC will be at least as easy to use as their present system.
"You can take this one step further and install a virtual machine on their Windows PC to allow them to play with Linux on their desktop. This measure has the added benefit that if they mess up the install -- chances of this are slim to none, of course -- it is no problem to recover it because it is being run in a virtual machine."