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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
The other day my wife was talking about her new job and having to take notes. For the past 30 years I’ve been keeping notes in text, then markdown in vim, starting with personal scripts, then vimwiki. A coworker showed me Obsidian, which while not FLOSS, does use an open standard for all its files. It pretty much does what my setup does.
Then it dawned on me that my wife and other non-techies just use whatever their computer has on it by default (i.e. OneNote). She never thought to go out and look for better productivity software. The idea that there is tons of better apps out there doesn’t register. She has a phone, knows about the app store and gets tons of stuff there but as for her desktop or laptop the idea of apps outside of MS Office and the video games she plays is lost on her.
They just want to get the job done. The fact that they considered a note-taking app at all isn’t universally normal. To this day my wife sends me messages in signal as a post-it to remember things, she could have just sent it to herself, but she used to do the same in sms and just applied that forward after I convinced her security was a good step.
We want the best, the nicest, the most useful thing. We apply the same rigor most non-technies use when choosing a car.
They want to fill a need that, at worst, bothers them a little.
My wife did the same on signal. When I showed her the “Note to self” feature she was amazed an. started using it. She use to get annoyed that we would text and her note would get lost but now it doesn’t.
It isn’t about finding the best, it is about finding better than the worst. My wife needs the features Obsidian has, she says she wished her notes would visually link together. What she doesn’t know is that such apps exist.
She wishes she could sync files between her phone and computer and not have to go to a website to get them. syncthing does that.
an open standard for all it’s files
All that and you still can’t use the right “its”.
The discussion is not improved by your contribution.
name checks out
Judging by how huge share of browser usage Firefox has, I am pretty sure vast majority of normies know nothing about Firefox
Okay but litterally everyone knows about Firefox.
I’m willing to concede some people don’t know about Linux. But I’ve never met anyone who didn’t know about Firefox.
Hah no they don’t. My partner doesn’t even really know what a browser is, or where the distinction between phone/pc and ‘the internet’ lies. Sure she might have heard of the word ‘firefox’ but no way she can explain what it is or does.
Everyone uses VLC still right? … Right?
No. People who are 30+ maybe. But there are tons of people in GenZ (my generation) and Alpha that don’t even know what folders or symlinks are. And Firefox is a nieche browser since 10 years or so.
I wouldn’t be surprised if gen alpha hasn’t heard if it because schools primarily use Chromebooks and the only browser is chrome
Happens all the time. Also, nerds tend to overestimate the amount of resources, like time or money, someone would put on something they care about.
Right here in Lemmy I had this interaction where someone argued that if one were to lose their photos because Google had an oopsie, it’s kind of their fault because they didn’t have a backup plan.
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.
My experience with the Linux communities here has been the opposite. Very welcoming, and very helpful.
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.
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.”
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.
I think they’ll know about VLC, Audacity and Blender also
libreoffice is getting there too
every pc i’ve used has had libreoffice, even at my job even though they have licenses for almost everything from microsoft
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
When did that change occur?
Since their inception
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
I think that if you are in this meme, you’re either wrong and thinking too highly of yourself, or you need to touch grass there’s no way a normal person actually acts that way
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.
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.
Experience has taught me that Intelligence and Wisdom are very different things, and whilst the former can help get the latter faster, having lots of the former in no way form or shape guarantees any of the latter or even that one will get any of it.
I would even say that there’s a level of high intelligence but not high enough (I mentally call them “Entry Level Geniouses”) that leads people who think they’re so much better than everybody else whilst not being intelligent enough to figure out the limits in capability and breath of use of intelligence alone, so they never figure out the whole “All I know is that I know nothing” and don’t really start walking down the path to Wisdom. Elon Musk is probably a good example.
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.
I said “web browser” when talking to a mac user. They had noo idea what I was talking about till I said safari xd.
Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.
Yeah, like ‘google it’ instead of ‘look it up’
I started replacing “to google sth.” with " to search sth." since I use several search engines besides google and for some of them using the brand name is just ridiculous.
“Let me DuckDuckGo that real quick!” quack
Lemme gpt it
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 god that would trigger me so much XD
This is much more when when using ducksuckg. “I duck the word and replace it” “I’ll just duck the answer”
Suck my duck! quack!
your anecdote is making me irrationally angry
It’s “just ask ChatGPT” now
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 :(
hahaha wow
I google stuff in the brave
searchgoogle engineXD
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
oh no. this tool is too good.
just one loop they don’t know about all the others
oh whoops
it’s just whoop
!fedimemes@feddit.uk would love this
I would say software people are actually too accommodating.
Take a look around at what being too accommodating did to the web.
