Could one hold a neighborhood class?
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For sure, neighborhood or public library classes are viable.
However, certain things come into play when working with the general public:
Incredibly stupid or overly obtuse people. You are smart. Your family might be smart. But people are basic, stupid creatures. Concepts such as “right click”, “save the file”, and “go to your Documents folder” are bizarre, foreign concepts and terms. If you want to attract power users and admins, that’s one thing, but spreading the good word of Linux to the public is going to mean lots of different skillsets. This is especially true concerning children.
Parents are incredibly obsessive and controlling, and rightfully so in some respects. They will harass you about Photoshop and Dreamweaver (yes, in 2017). They will ask about Mac and viruses. They will ask if you can come look at their computer at home (brb checking Cougar status), they will ask if you can turn up their Internets. Not tune up, TURN UP.
If you can take it in stride, have a fun, bubbly persona, and not cheat on your significant other, I say do it. My wife and I have had a lot of great experiences, made some friends, and changed lives. I got an e-mail from someone I taught two years ago and started crying like a 4 year old. Shit like that makes it worth it.
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See I feel like this might be true of the people who would sign up for a computer literacy course. But people who have spent a year working in an office in the last decade? No, these users are far from admins or power users, but they’re resourceful creatures when they need to get something done.
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I think that Linux will spread naturally at it’s own rate. You can and should recommend it where you think it will work for someone, and it’s perfectly fine if it doesn’t sometimes.
The main thing I do is disprove any untrue accusations that Linux isn’t good enough.
I’ve heard that Libre Office Calc performs badly. I quoted my Dad’s business where I helped him move an old XP machine to Mint. He uses gigantic spreadsheets, tens of thousands of lines with images across dozens of sheets. Works fine. Anecdotal as it may be it certainly made them think a bit harder than “Libre Office is just crap”.
Another one is “Audio is bad on Linux”. It’s just not true anymore, a well set up distro can handle high quality audio very well.
“Linux is hard to use”. Tell them it’s not. Show them it’s not.
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I want to be leaf. This is my anecdotal, personal experience, but with teaching you cannot assume that. I worked support a long time. We needed the computer name to connect. I would ask “Do you have experience connecting to the help desk?” If the answer was “No,” I would say “Click the Start Menu and right click Computer, select Properties…”
About half the people would freeze, start sceaming to slow down, or tell me “I’m not a techie”, “I’m not tech literate”, or “I’m not tech savvy”.
Granted, this was mostly loan underwriters, sales, or finance people. Working with developers, business analysts, and engineers was a bit different, but they would sometimes be confused by what I would ask them do.
Excel, Word, Foxit, Adobe file management was the same way. “Where did you save the file?” would yield silence or “I don’t understand” with quite a few users.
Not 100%, and it definitely depends on the company culture. But, when teaching a class, I recommend assuming minimal level of knowledge, it will save potential frustration.
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The way my mom and dad got into Linux is perhaps rare, but here’s how it went.
They both had windows on all of their laptops/PC’s, and my mom was using Adobe specifically InDesign for publishing.
My Dad, being aware of Linux and what the philosophy stood for, decided to switch on that basis. He just does browsing and light office work, and Libreoffice has proven to work very well.
My Mom, on the other hand, started to get screwed over by Adobe’s licensing. She was finding Adobe CC to be too expensive, then tried to install an older CS6 version on disc that she had, and got screwed by it being activated in the past, though that wasn’t in use anymore.
She got tired of it, and decided to switch to Linux to avoid these issues and stick to free as in libre software. She’s been very happy with it for 3 months now, and my dad for around a year.
Case in point, let people be aware that Linux is an option, and what Linux stands for and what you can do with it, and maybe they will switch over in their own time.
Was real easy getting my parents to switch, They didn’t have a working computer and I just happed to have a bunch of almost working computers laying around to mix and match parts until I had all the best working components in one machine and I tossed Manjaro onto it. Helped them pick out a new computer last year with windows 10 and they tend to use the unholy abomination that I scrapped together from dying prebuilts over the Windows machine even though the new computer has a FX-8310 and 8GB ram and the old one is a C2D with 1GB of ram.
On an individual level wait till someone has had their computer for a few years and want to get a new one. “Hey before you get a new PC throw Linux on it and see how it does”
Extolling the “power of the terminal” and posix compliance my not be as effective as saying, “hey look it has a start button!”
Also recognize that some people will always use windows till the day they die. Even when they are family 
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