linuxmemes

The next comment was “What’s Linux?”

In fairness, there's a 70% chance this comment was posted by a bot that was, itself, being hosted on a Linux server.

I'm of two minds on this.

In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.

On the other hand it's so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.

They were one of the lucky 10,000.

Yes? The number of people I met in college that doesn't even heard about firefox was surprising.

if they are, it’s not much more than "that thing they heard of sometime", i don’t think the layperson really considers them as alternatives to what they’re using.

i remember, when i first switched to an non-chrome browser many years ago, my friends kept asking me if stuff like google, google drive or google classroom (which our school used) still worked on it. many people don’t know the difference between google chrome (the web browser) and google (the search engine)!

I would give it a coin-flip as to whether the average person could name their current OS. Not sure if I would have to give credit to people who respond "The Microsoft one" or "Google Phone" in order for that bet to be fair.

I had a client who was the head of product at her buisness. We'd meet at the end of every sprint to do demos and planning. Anyway when my team mentioned there were some issues on Firefox her knee jerk response was to openly say "I hate Firefox users"

I have tons of stories like that but the point is that even people who are aware don't universally love it

Awareness is just the bare minimum

I know this change probably happened gradually over the course of time, but it’s truly shocking to me how many people my age can’t do shit on a computer.

I’m in my mid 40s.

Like, this was understandable when I was a kid doing computer stuff and wowing all the adults - the PC was brand new. But people who are my age NOW grew up with this stuff all around them! Like, you didn’t know how to CLICK? You were born in 1983 what the fuck, Carol!

Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.

just one loop they don't know about all the others

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.

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.

Even the average tech person doesn't know what it means.
The term was coined by Christine Peterson of the Free software movement, and is defined to specify software that is free and open source (FOSS).
This was after problems with the term "free software" because it was a bad term, that was hijacked to also include software free of cost but closed and proprietary, so far from open source. And free was not generally understood as free as in libre.
After the Free software movement coined the term. The Free Software Foundation also adopted it, and to distinguish they called it FLOSS, for "Free as in Libre and Open Source Software", where the libre means that the code is protected from being "jailed" because it has a so called strong copyleft license, like for instance GPL. So MIT, BSD and public domain are not FLOSS but they are FOSS.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software

/Nothing in this life is simple.