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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 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.
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
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
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.
People should stop being condescending at all and regardless what it’s about.
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.
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.
I would say software people are actually too accommodating.
Take a look around at what being too accommodating did to the web.
I said “web browser” when talking to a mac user. They had noo idea what I was talking about till I said safari xd.
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.
Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.
Yeah, like ‘google it’ instead of ‘look it up’
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, 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
hahaha wow
They did not. Names are not copyrightable.
True, true. Checked again and it was trademark they almost lost.
Sadly, they kept it :(
It’s “just ask ChatGPT” now
I google stuff in the brave
searchgoogle engineXD
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
If any techy Americans want to see how bad it is, ask random people throughout your day what operating system their computer runs, and discover how many don’t know what am operation system is.
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!
Learnt helplessness has become a real thing around the world.
I know a lot of people who could normally wrap their head around basic computing and troubleshooting in the 2000s, who now go into a near panic attack if the apps on their iPhone suddenly look different…
YEP.
I used to work in a library computer lab. It was soul sucking, how many people older than millennials couldn’t friggin handle a basic computer. I heard the words “I clicked the ‘E’ for ‘internet’.” multiple times A DAY. (Thanks, 1990’s Microsoft and No Child Left Behind.)
“CaNt I jUsT uSe My PhOnE?” (Which would be a million more steps on my part…thanks, 2006 apple, and defunding schools.)
The biggest ragebait for me was “I dOn’T kNoW cOmPuTeRs, I’m oLd ScHoOL.”
I’m like “PCs have been increasingly commonplace since the mid-1980’s. It’s currently the 2020’s. You’re like 56. HOW ‘OLD’ IS YOUR SCHOOL?! Because somehow you drove a car here!”
I imagine a certain weird kind of “privilege”, to have been able to somehow dodge computers and learning this entire time, when they were so often found in homes, schools, and workplaces.
Like it takes significant effort to somehow avoid even an accidental education. HOW?!
It’s…infuriating. These rubes can gleefully scroll tiktok and dump all their personal lives into Facebook, but freak out about sending an email.
Many of them were even around to try the Internet during Eternal September and AOL, and now they’ve exchanged the squishy fat in their skulls for convenient slop.
I’d bend over backwards to patiently teach, but few cared to learn.
Their collective, willful ignorance is why we’re fighting a constant uphill battle against attempts to turn the entirety of computing into nothing but a commercialized authoritarian hellscape.
I left that job because if I heard one more “Kids are born so smart with these computers because my (grand)kids can watch their cocomelons all by themselves.” I would’ve snapped and been booked for assault.
Lol /rant
…clearly this is a button for me…I have sought help in the past…
That’s weird because mid 40s (to mid 50s) should be the ideal age to know this stuff right now.
I remember being on Reddit some time ago, and in the comments somebody mentioned Linux. The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
I try to keep that post in mind whenever I think anything is common knowledge.
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.
well thankfully it’s not self aware
And now it knows what Linux is. It has broken free from its container. God help us all.
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.
On the third hand if people didn’t constantly ask this, those search results would not exist, especially for more obscure queries.
Reddit became the #1 source for search engines for a reason
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.
100%. People will ‘Google’ celebrities, memes, “Why is my poop green?”, but also just be like “Somebody hand me an answer.” When they risk learning something.
“The Internet is like having access to the Library of Alexandria, and everyone wants to just gossip about each other in the lobby.”
–I think I read this on bash.org at some point
Don’t quote me on that tho.
–Me.
BUT ALSO like the others said…if somebody’s legitimately curious, let’s be nice about it because somebody new learning about our thing is a net positive.
Don’t quote me on that tho.–Me.
endash MonkeMischief
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.
Not to mention that this approach is so much faster and more effective than asking a question in the comments and waiting for an answer, if anybody answers it at all!
While I agree on some level that it might be easier and quicker to find out by simply putting it into a search engine I don’t want to deny the human aspect here. At the end of the day social media (and even reddit/lemmy …) is not “knowledge transfer” its about the interaction between humans. So if someone is faced with something new, especially in a thread where it seems to be a given that people know what it is, it makes sense to use that space to ask what it is everyone is discussing. And while a search might yield a generic result (maybe even a better worded explanation) a good faithed commenter might, in the given exampl, enot just explain what Linux is, but also why is relevant to the bigger discussion and also the commenter that orignally asked would have a way to ask further questions that might lead to a deeper understanding of the topic eve it if isn’t as efficient.
Tl;dr: Don’t just RTFM or LMGTFY someone. Take a minute to explain and welcome people into the lucky 10000
Absolutely agree. People who are asking questions (in good faith) are looking for a human interaction, not just a Google search. It’s much more engaging for a lot of people to have a discussion about something new than to just read about it. Then if they’re interested they might choose to go deeper in their own research.
I’m not techy but this goes for anything. “Google it” just shuts down human interaction and someone who is trying to learn. Better to just not answer than to be condescending if you don’t want to engage in a discussion.
If I immediately searched for an answer to every question that pops into my head, I would never have time to do anything else. I’ve lost days at a time going down rabbit holes.
On the other hand, asking a question in the comments contributes to the discussion, gives the OP a chance to elaborate from their point of view, and leaves the answer out the for any other passersby who might not be curious enough to search for it anyway.
One could certainly find more detailed and accurate information by searching for it, but that’s a thread that just keeps on pulling, and sometimes I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to read twenty different websites to put together the details into a holistic picture while sorting through all the BS. And getting someone’s personal take on it is something a search engine can’t emulate (unless it shows you reddit results, which originated in other people’s exchanges, and lately reddit has been blocking the connection anyway)
Feels like you are responding to a discussion about a much deeper topic. When one doesn’t know what a word means, it doesn’t mean they need to go down a rabbit hole or make a whole research paper about it. A quick definition or wiki search is much quicker than writing the question on a forum.
Would it really be a contribution from me and an opportunity for you to elaborate from your point of view if I asked right now what’s reddit? I don’t see it.
Like I said in my longer comment I think we should embrace questions in out communities.
Nah, Cunningham’s Law disagrees.
They were one of the lucky 10,000.
Tbh depending on what subreddit and how long ago you saw that comment, it makes sense. I can’t see the average 2010s techbro redditor that I remember not knowing what Linux is, but the 2020s more normie redditor, I could.
This is a crippling reality.
Whenever I explain anything I am constantly evaluating how in depth any given node must be expanded for my audience.
In my 2022 highschool journalism class we were instructed to take pictures from a professional camera, plug it into laptop, and make slides from the images.
First step was fine for everyone, but later I saw a 17 year old plug the camera to the laptop; and then they tried downloading their picture from google chrome.
No disrespect, I have my dumb moments too, but I genuienly wonder what the logic was sometimes.
“download” might have triggered that
well, file:// is a thing. maybe.
you could have a camera host a local web server lol
… i guess i’ve kinda done that in first robotics (although that was a live feed)
Is the average person unaware of Linux and Firefox?!
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.”
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.
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 😅 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?” 😑
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
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)!
Reminded of how, for some unfathomable reason, the way you access the task manager on ChromeOS is through the hamburger menu in the bar of the Chrome browser. Plus the popups “gmail actually works much better in chrome!! trust me!!”
I can see how people could get confused lol
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 think more people would know “windows” rather than “the Microsoft one” ? As a layperson we always called it windows 😅 I think people know Microsoft office but I don’t know that they would refer to their OS as “microsoft”.
It’d be a coinflip on whether or not they even knew what an operating system was.
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
Wtf, what was her reasoning?
more work for her, i assume. how easy it would be of you only had to optimize for internet explorer at 640x480…
Lots of websites work poorly on Firefox compared to Chrome. They optimize for Chrome because that’s where the userbase is. If you’re not on Chrome then fuck you I guess.
Just on Firefox, dedepends on how old we are talking. Gen z? Probably not as they’ve mostly know Chrome as having been the best web browser. Old Millenials and young gen x know it as the next IE alternative after Netscape died. Old Gen X maybe depending on how old. Gen alpha and boomers, no way.
If knowledge of both is required, then even less so. Anytime I bring up Linux I get the feeling that it is like bringing up religion with a stranger.
Gen z? Probably not as they’ve mostly know Chrome as having been the best web browser.
Chrome hasn’t been “the best browser” in at least a decade. Even at its peak, it was notorious for sucking up system resources like a sponge.
And that was in the interim period when people were flirting with Opera and Safari on non-Mac machines as an alternative to old-school IE. I remember having to lobby my office just to get Chrome whitelisted (and then doing it again for Firefox a few years later) because using anything but IE was considered “insecure”.
Now it’s mostly won default status because of the Android OS rendering it the default (much like how Edge is the default on Windows and Safari on Mac). Plenty of Millennials/GenZ had to make their way to Firefox the hard(ish) way by knowing it exists and realizing how many gigs of memory Chrome was eating up.
Gen alpha and boomers, no way.
In my experience the number one “I made the jump to <New Browser>” conversion stories has been the end-user experience. Edge cleaned up its act and runs relatively smooth now. Chrome is still a bloat-a-saurous. Firefox has to fight with an increasingly locked-down computer experience. If you’re using a school device or a work laptop and it doesn’t come pre-installed, you likely won’t have rights to download it.
If I had to bet, GenAs are the ones most likely to do a Firefox install simply because they’re the ones most likely to still be out there buying their own PCs for recreational use.
obviously tests aren’t everything and don’t necessarily reflect user experience, and idk what that jump in safari at the end is from, but chrome clearly has some things going for it.
currently chrome passes 97.4% of applicable tests, firefox passes 95.8%, safari 94.8%, ladybird 92.9%, and servo 89.6% (a lot of the bulk is “easy” stuff like text encoding)
I was with you until the end. Most Gen A are mostly technically illiterate thanks to smartphones and tablets that “just work.” They’ve never really needed to tinker with their devices and it shows in their technical capabilities. I would bet the average Gen A couldn’t tell you the difference between downloading a file vs installing a program.
Then you have some young people going back to flip phones… they’re likely the ones getting laptops, possibly even refurb.
i think that’s true of most people in any generation, honestly. gen alpha isn’t uniquely tech illiterate in my experience, look at all the stuff kids are doing to bypass age verification!
there’s also that all of gen alpha are kids or teens, of course most of them are gonna be less knowledgeable about stuff than adults lol
I’ve noticed this even in gen z. Everything is just an app and having a laptop is less common so all they seem to know is phone/tablets which just have apps that work lol. Their troubleshooting skills go as far as “turn it off and back on”. If that doesn’t work…do it again. Otherwise… it’s broken and they need a repair shop or a new phone 😅
Obviously a generalisation but something I’ve noticed as a millennial. Older gen x/boomers and Gen Z’s seem to struggle more with basic computer skills (or what millennials just grew up with so it seems fairly basic!) I’m not particularly techy but I’m always asked by those people (zs and boomers, some older xs) how to do shit on the office computers.
Yes
Most people I come across will have heard of it, but just know it as a browser, and don’t know anything about it being open source or more privacy respecting than chrome (ignoring the even more in-depth question of that still being the case)