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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
That’s why I try to show people I know how to get FOSS alternatives for their everyday apps. It takes a bit of patience but trust me when I say this: Most people are more tech savvy than you think, they just don’t wanna go through a judging community.
The “who still uses Google?” crowd forgets most people just want their computer to work, not become a weekend side quest.
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.
I feel obligated to mention Logseq here. It’s similar to obsidian, but FLOSS (AGPL-v3).
I’ve tried it before and I like the concept but in my head I struggle using something not directly how it was intended. I want content rich notes, not just bullets. Yes logseq has support but it just feels wrong for some reason.
If it was around two jobs ago when I was just copying lots of meetings I would have been all over it.
I found Logseq to be pretty confusing honestly. I ended up settling on Trilium.
All my work computers are provided by the companies I work for and per their rules I can only take and store notes using their approved software and on their servers which basically means I work on a locked down Microsoft ecosystem. Access to third party productivity software is simply not possible outside of certain role specific specialist software.
I would guess literally millions of employees have a similar setup so it’s not that we are tech illiterate per say, but more accurately in the corporate world this option doesn’t exist so there is no point trying.
Outside work my productivity tools consist of a Moleskine notebook with tasteful check paper.
I have worked at places like that. The issue is real. But I have also asked for apps to be audited to get on the approved list. Again not always possible.
But I still think the general issue stands. There are a lot of people unaware of software. I even know developers who have never learned their tools and built muscle memory but instead just used whatever came with their computer because they aren’t out there looking.
Honestly OneNote is pretty good for the people who like it though. I personally really can’t stand rich text editing, I really need a raw view. If I didn’t have those reservations I’d probably like OneNote more.
If I could use markdown with onenote I’d use it way more.
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.
syncthing + obsidian is a rockstar.
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.
Yet you huge nerds tizz out over the most boring and trite software trivia that’s obsolete within hours, but won’t learn basic grammar that will serve you your entire life?
I’d like to think that improves things by a tiny amount.
It doesn’t.
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
deleted by creator
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.
The vast majority of people I work with in my organization have absolutely no idea what Firefox is or that there are other browsers. You, me, and everyone here is living in a bubble.
Not too long ago, in the internet explorer era, Firefox had a huge market share. Something like 30%. Even if they didn’t use it themselves, they probably knew someone that did.
They may not remember it, but at some point they knew.
They may say they don’t know firefox, but if you ask them “do you remember there were some people that didn’t use internet explorer before chrome?” They’ll probably remember, even if they don’t remember the name.
There are quite a lot of people in the workforce now who are so young they won’t remember that!
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.
that’s the true ‘average’ person. they don’t know. they don’t understand. they don’t even want to know. they just use this magic thing that shows stuff from the internet. they don’t even know what a bookmark is, they just ‘google’ for everything. even google, ffs.
Years ago I watched a friend type google.com into the search/address bar of chrome, click the link, then begin to search. Painful.
“Why does your google look like that”
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.
Putting folders and symlinks in the same category is wild. Most people I know (basically every non-elderly non-toddler person) knows what a folder is. Yet only some of the programmers I know know what a symlink is. Not even a chance for non-programers.
At most they’ll know what a shortcut is. Which is not the same as a symlink.
I guess I’m a programmer now
I don’t know you. My comment doesn’t apply to you, sorry.
Knowing what a symlink is doesn’t make you a programmer. It’s just that I don’t know any non-programmer that knows what it is.
I didn’t know that symbolic links were a thing until like 2 years into using Linux daily. I didn’t know there was a difference between symlinks and shortcuts until I saw this comment!
To save others a trip to Wikipedia, both a symlink and a shortcut store a path to another file or directory. The biggest difference is that symlinks are resolved by your file system, whereas shortcuts are resolved by whatever program accesses them. So if your software doesn’t know what a symlink is, that doesn’t matter. It tries to access the symlink, and your file system says “oh hey they want that jpeg” and serves them that jpeg. Whereas if your software doesn’t know what a shortcut is, it’ll try to access the shortcut and be like “wtf this is just a file path, I was expecting a jpeg”
They can also store relative file paths, while shortcuts can only store absolute filepaths. So if your symlink references a file that’s in the same directory, you can move that directory and the symlink still works. Can’t do that with a shortcut.
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.
Wait, who was making that claim?
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
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.
I don’t understand this, if it’s installable on gentoo using the default method of building from source then it has to be open source, right?
Or have I misunderstood gentoo? I considered trying it once, but didn’t fancy compiling everything on a potato.
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.
People should stop being condescending at all and regardless what it’s about.
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’
Googol is a hitten for great quantities, it worked great as a word, and it would be great if Google lost it as a trademark. However we have the force to seed a new word that has a similar image.
If the internet was an ocean of content, then we could say “let’s ocean it”. Ocean as a verb makes as much sense as the verb google.
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
Oh it did trigger me as well.
Didn’t know how to react because I was so dumbfounded.
your anecdote is making me irrationally angry
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!
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
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.
