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foss nerds stop being condescending to those who don't know the same things you do challenge (impossible)
(files.catbox.moe)
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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
Yes? The number of people I met in college that doesn't even heard about firefox was surprising.
These days I'd expect large number of people in college to not even know what a file system is. I've read articles where professors complain about this.
No no, not like "NTFS / BTRFS / ReiserFS / TempleFS / EXT4..."
...like..."Folders are how you organize files. And you can rename files. The extension tells you what the file is."
"Filesystem? You mean the downloads folder? Yes I know about it. You just tap the Files app"
π
Conflicted on filename extensions. For the average person it works just fine, and I suppose that's what probably matters. It's not very common for not knowing the details of how they work to matter. It's just silly that the same information is also in the start of the file 99% of the time. It is nice though to have a readable, usually reliable label, and then have a signature anyways for when different names overlap. Wikipeda lists 4 completely unrelated types with a .mod extension, for example.
Pretty much any application will correctly open any file type it supports, regardless of the extension. So it is quite unintuitive that you could have a file named ".png" that seems to work completely fine yet is actually a jpeg or something. But that hopefully isn't a case that people run into very often, so it probably doesn't matter.
Some people also don't care much one way or another. If you swap the icons and set the same home screen, they'll happily use any browser.
This is my take on a lot of Linux distros nowadays. Give them Ubuntu or Fedora KDE and a windows skin and most people won't realise anything's changed.
I tried that with my mom's computer (with consent, ofc). The only thing keeping that machine on Windows is a niche embroidery software that apparently is missing a custom cursor when running through WINE. It's called "Embrilliance" if anyone wants to look into it. I've also thought about running it through WinBoat, but I've been too busy to test it, as of current.
One relatively bright person I knew in college asked me "what's this Linksys you're always talking about?" I had recently setup my laptop to dual boot Arch alongside Windows, as this was back when you couldn't really play most games on Linux.
Nobody I knew in college had heard of Firefox, but that's probably because it didn't exist yet.
Unless you mean the Clint Eastwood film
I'm on the edge of that, it started existing while I was in college, but was called Phoenix, and then Firebird. It didn't have the name Firefox until I had graduated.
I remember seeing that airplane on the VHS all the time at the video store
That's wild. I remember when i was in high-school there were quite a few people that installed firefox on the school computer just to be quirky, since it was one of the few programs they would let you install on it lol.
Firefox and, Opera my beloved, was the thing during the 2010s
Now that you mention it, i think i remember using Opera on my phone at the time. I don't remember why tbh, maybe i felt like it was more lightweight and faster, but no clue if that was actually true.
I first got introduced to Blender in basically the same way back in elementary school
those computers probably weren't actually very restricted, but none of us knew enough about computers for that to matter lol. as long as they blocked us from going on the download pages
other stupid thing someone figured out how to run was that Star Wars ASCII thing in the terminal (lol looked it up and found this article https://www.instructables.com/How-to-get-an-ASCII-Star-Wars-movie-on-Mac/)
Oh man... I mean, I thought everyone knew about Linux at least. Firefox, I mean, maybe yeah I've definitely met people that don't know about Firefox, but I think a lot of people have at least heard of Linux. No? Damn...
I don't think so lol. I'm not a super techy person and the only reason I know Linux is because of my high school boyfriend lol, 20 years ago, who used it. I think he set it up on one of my computers at one point too. I don't think I've ever heard anyone else (offline) talk about Linux π definitely not a common knowledge thing.
It's actually been pretty interesting watching some of the stuff he used back 20 years ago that has started being spoken about more commonly that were just "nerd shit" back then lol. Vpns are common knowledge now, they were definitely "nerd shit" back in the day. Plex is widely used. I'm also glad I still have access to the private tracker he got me onto because that's grown big too, easy as.
But Linux? Nope. I don't think that's entered the common knowledge base. People know windows, android and maybe iOS. I don't even think a lot of people would know what "open source" means.
There's the people who know what source code is, then the subset of those who have heard of open source, then the subset of those who actually know what it means as opposed to like source available
I've tried explaining what Linux is to people, and when I mention it's an operating system, its not uncommon to hear the response, "What's an operating system?" π
It's funny how that question can become serious again when you do actually know what you're talking about
I remember this video addressing it at the end and basically giving up because it's so meaningless lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmPIxfCggFw
You overestimate the amount of people who actually use a computer.
I remember my uncle using Firefox, so I thought people heard about Firefox if they at least send emails. As for Linux. I thought like 40% of people at least heard of it without knowing what it is.
That's feels absurdly high. I was feeling over confident thinking maybe 10%...
I'm going to assume that you didn't study a STEM subject?
I can assure you there are lots of people in computer science that don't know what linux, foss or firefox are.
Computer Science