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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 found it funny how condescending all the foss nerds have been to the problems in the LTT linux video. So many people were mad that someone unfamiliar with linux didnt know everything and have a perfect experience. The worst part was they had this opinion and attacked the user while demonstrating they had absolutely no idea what the issues were caused by and could have easily run into the same issue.
Are we talking about that original one? Where he tried Pop!_OS and tried to install Steam and the package installer gave a big message that something wasn’t right, so he chuckled, TL;DR’d and hit “yes anyway” and was shocked he borked his install?
That LTT?
I’m never gonna fault somebody for unfamiliarity, but we should absolutely fault people, especially ones with any tech experience, for not reading helpful messages right in front of them.
i am reminded about this one time i was doing desktop support at a hospital. super smart doctor was having a problem and i asked them to recreate the problem for me
oh they did… and instantly clicked the error away when it showed up and then instantly looked at my for an answer
i asked them to do it again, same
i was flabbergasted… i had to point out that i need to know what that error was
“oh it’s the same thing it always says” was the reply
thankfully i understood the the workflow and asked to sit and recreated the error again… AND guess what? IT FUCKING TOLD THEM EXACTLY HOW TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEM
wow i would hide a note in my chest cavity before they do surgery on me
a bloody slip of paper hidden within my ribcage, enscribed “learn how to read, idiot!”
Both. Neither are what I would expect to be the new users fault. The warning message was vauge. You are about to do something potentially harmful is a warning that comes up on a ton of things like deleting a user or a folder. usually you think about what you’re doing an if you know what you’re doing then you proceed. He thought he was just installing steam and so he proceeded.
To be fair, LTT has had a very long history of shitting on Linux, while giving Windows a free pass.
I dont think thats being fair and I dont think that is true. Linux users perceive a video showing real issues on linux to be shitting on linux but do not consider a video that contains windows issues to be shitting on windows.
I’m talking about the LTT staff.
Proof of this is that for ten years, they published zero videos specifically about Windows shortcomings, but they did I believe two separate Linux “challenges”, where the main conductor was Windows users complaining about Linux. And while I agree that some of the complaints were legitimate, many others, like UX differences compared to Windows, definitely are not.
watch the 30 day windows challenge or the tons of videos about various windows bugs. In what would would we expect their coverage of windows to be the same as linux? Windows is used by majority of their audience it doesnt have the same preconceived notions that linux has so the approach will be different. They have no shortage of negative coverage of windows shortcomings, its issues, its bugs.
There are no 30 day windows challenge videos?
There are a bunch of videos about how to configure windows “the right way”, which, to me, seems like a way of coping with the negative side of windows without questioning it too much.
And look, I get that windows users may have trouble with Linux. But LTT have been overly critical and even dismissive of Linux for the longest time. There are videos as recent as 2022 where some of the complains about Linux were straight up “I don’t like how this works”.