alt text
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’m not saying there aren’t exceptions. linux users come from various backgrounds, if someone told me they use Linux I don’t assume they’re from CS. I’m not either. But given they’re not from CS, the chances they’ve even heard of it is very low.
It’s just a sad but real fact that when you go out into the real world outside of your online communities with similar interests, people don’t know Linux or open source.