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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
I have had a comm literally dogpile me claiming linux wasn’t designed for multi sessions or to run as a terminal server.
My respect for lemmy foss forums is in the fucking toilet.
there’s a lot of people that hopped on the Linux train in the past few years. which is great, truly. but many of them don’t understand where it came from or what it was originally designed to solve. particularly on lemmy, people are pretty up in arms about their opinions of Linux all the time, so I would bet whichever comm was doing that is mainly the new heads. again, love that it’s getting mainstream recognition but I wish the combative attitude was at least tabled until they actually understand it.
the recent debate of systemd in here kind of drove home that a lot of people just parrot points without having their own thought out opinions.
As soon as a kind of Tech starts getting fanboys, you start getting ignorant bollocks about it, not just from the fanboys but also from the kind of people that, just as emotionally, set themselves against the fanboys not because of any understanding of the weaknesses of the Tech itself but purelly as a psychological need to set themselves against the fanboys.
Linux used to have a huge barrier to entry - for example, you used to literally have to understand how CRTs worked in order to configure X and get it running - which kept the fanboyism down and the few whose like for it went all the way into fanboyisms were at least technically savvy so mainly understood what they were talking about, but nowadays the “quality” of fanboys is closer to the level of game, celebrity or or political fanboys - people highly emotionally engaged that don’t have any in depth understanding and are only “experts” on the highly visible superficial stuff.
Anyways, all this to say that fanboyism, whilst being a bad way to relate to Tech (IMHO, and the same for people who set themselves against fanboys as just as mindless contrarians), does indicate to me that Linux is definitelly becoming established as mainstream rather than the OS for mainly server side experts and hobbyists that it was for decades.
Oh let’s be honest, elitism has always been baked into linux a bit. Remember the old joke about how to get help on a linux comm? Ask and get told to RTFM even if you detail a complex issue that demonstrates you have in fact read tf m. Say “linux sucks because you can’t do X or Y like you can in windows” and they fall over themselves…
But yeah, the new batch of users are just…you want to gently grab them by the face and say “you’re not fucking nero hacking the matrix because a command line interface doesn’t make you shit your pants any more my dude. Stop acting like it.”
I think they’ll know about VLC, Audacity and Blender also
All FOSS nerds that joined after 2020 only know OBS, charge they phone, distro hop, eat hot chip, and GUI.
VLC and Blender are not really alternatives tho, rather industry standard
This is true for every field. I have noticed this many times, whenever I was introduced to something new I never expected those things to be that deep. So I have understood that almost all things are shallow in nature to us until and unles we ourself step into it
Actually most firefox users don’t know its open source. I was baffled for years about its inclusion in ubuntu and fedora by default. I even specifically went out of my way to find “open source version of firefox”. This is how I discovered it was open source. This was after using gentoo for several years.
People should stop being condescending at all and regardless what it’s about.
I would say software people are actually too accommodating.
Take a look around at what being too accommodating did to the web.
Only Linux? ONLY Linux?
It’s the Gnu/Linux ecosystem with a shit load of software.
(yeah which the average person has no idea about, proving the point in the comic 😁)
Thank you Richard, however:
- Not all Linux distributions use GNU.
- GNU coreutils aren’t the only or even most important component of a modern distro. systemd is.
Ooooo seems like you’re personally invested and did not catch the tongue in cheek drift.
The most intelligent people aren’t those with the greatest amount of knowledge but rather they’re the people that are capable of patiently breaking down concepts for their fellow human beings to understand.
I said “web browser” when talking to a mac user. They had noo idea what I was talking about till I said safari xd.
I’ve taken to calling it ‘The internet App’ when talking to none techy people.
The real annoying one is getting people to find the “Start” button on Windows realizing it hasn’t be branded that since XP.
Same, you’re not gonna believe who i said it to… My networking classmate
Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.
Yeah, like ‘google it’ instead of ‘look it up’
I’ve heard people referring to the internal search function of a program as “google”.
One time someone wanted to use “find and replace” in VsCode and he just said “I google the word and replace it”.
Oh, that’s a funny one. Google didn’t want you to use that either, as they almost lost right to their own name copyright (or they did? Can’t remember) due to it becoming common word xD
They did not. Names are not copyrightable.
True, true. Checked again and it was trademark they almost lost.
Sadly, they kept it :(
I google stuff in the brave
searchgoogle engineIt’s “just ask ChatGPT” now
oh no. this tool is too good.
!fedimemes@feddit.uk would love this
just one loop they don’t know about all the others
oh whoops
I think asking why people use Google these days is totally valid, because it is not even good anymore
Don’t even get me started on how many people don’t even know what an address bar is. They Google everything.
The vast majority of people don’t give a shit don’t care and still would prefer to use it. Hell myself as a technical person in the IT field for 20 plus years would much rather use Google than most of the alternatives out there within the environment that I have to use to do the job I do.
In my 2022 highschool journalism class we were instructed to take pictures from a professional camera, plug it into laptop, and make slides from the images.
First step was fine for everyone but later I saw a 17 year old plug the camera to the laptop and then try downloading their picture from google chrome.
No disrespect, I have my dumb moments too, but I genuienly wonder what the logic was sometimes.
“download” might have triggered that
well, file:// is a thing. maybe.
you could have a camera host a local web server lol
… i guess i’ve kinda done that in first robotics (although that was a live feed)
Ok so how different is Firefox from any other web browser? Seems like the basics are all pretty similar. Address bar, bookmarks, click links. But maybe I am showing my bias here. What am I missing?
Chrome based browsers are riddled with privacy invasive features, data collection etc…
Also, ad blocking in chrome is crippled purposely because Google wants ad revenue.
Firefox has less of these anti features, and there are plenty of Firefox derivatives that have none of them.
don’t forget that some of chrome is encrypted and only Google gets to see the sauce
where as all of Firefox is available to look at, but it’s a mess of years and years of building, so it’s impossible to understand unless you’re dedicated
I study proteins and I chatter on about them, but once in a rare while I’ll talk to a normal person and they’ll be say “like, the food group” or in introductions I’ll say I’m a structural biologist and some people look at me blankly then say something about “bone structure”. It kills me a little inside.
I used to think everyone at least knew VLC media player or Firefox, but nope.
Now I first ask which field, if they’re CS they know linux, if art, they know blender, if geosciences they know QGIS, anything else is hard
maybe orcaslicer for 3d printing people? seems like the most popular nowadays, although it’s getting so fragmented with every manufacturer’s own slicer branch…
yeah, this is hard
oh, people who do streaming or youtubing stuff probably know OBS
there’s also probably a certain demographic for audacity
Psh, I’ve been on Linux for almost 20 years and I’m a guitarist lol
Haha I’m an aspiring game dev and I know a little bit about a ton of software!
…and I suck at most of it. But I can hold a conversation about it at least! :D
P.S: Haven’t heard of QGIS tho! My partner used ARCGIS though, and would always get annoyed when I pronounced it “Ark-jizz.”
Perhaps theyd be less annoyed it you pronounced it “arse-jizz”?
