I constantly remind myself of the George Carlin(I think) quote:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.”
Also important to remember Douglas Adams (when underestimating stupid people):
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Have gotten to post that one twice this week!
I always think about the effort to create a bear proof trash can in Yosemite that gave us the phrase “there is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist”.
It’s easy enough to design and even build a bear proof garbage can. So long as you are OK with locking out 90% of the users.
gotta add the babbage classic :
On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
That sounds like my ex colleague. He could not comprehend people typing non numbers into his input boxes on his little application and I had to break thing à down for him. He actually got upset over it. “It asks for a positive, integer value. What’s unclear about that? Why would you type text in?”
sighuses the word “integer” in a communication with the user
Oh honey…
Right? The guy was a 40yo engineer. A real nerd’s nerd. This might explain that :,D
While I don’t disagree with this in principal, it’s important to distinguish between stupidity and ignorance. Most people don’t know about OSes because they’ve never needed to learn more than how to do basic tasks, and so are ignorant of how they work, what alternatives are out there, and why someone might choose one. This is very different to being incapable of those technicalities if shown a good reason to do so.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
If you put Linux Mint on the average persons PC and set it up with the same desktop icons as their windows pc they wouldn’t know it wasn’t windows.
Just show them where the web browser is and done!
No shit I did this for my partners grandparent. All they needed was the browser to do shit like Facebook and paying bills. Slapped Linux Mint on their near dinosaur laptop with a Windows theme and they were none the wiser.
I started building pcs to replace cable boxes for people. The realization I had is that most people’s understanding of technology starts and ends with their phone.
And they don’t even understand their phones.
Most of them dont even understand themselve
A lot of them dont even undersand
I don’t even
Am in tech. Surrounded by tech people. Front devs, back devs, data engineers, data scientists and analysts, IT techs…
They know windows. They know macOS as an “easier alternative for normies”. Some of them even prefer it because it’s “easy”. A few of them even know there’s a terminal somewhere, but wouldn’t
git commitfrom the command line even if their life depended on it.A lot of them have heard of Linux, in a distant and nebulous way. Most of them still believe that Linux is confined to the server space or a weird dev environment inside WSL because you’re developing for servers, that you can’t daily drive Linux as a desktop, or that you can’t game on Linux. None of them would consider switching even if they spend their day complaining about how shitty windows is.
This is true for about 95% of the tech people I interact with btw. Big tech psyop is real.
I wouldn’t take a developer who can’t write git commit from command line seriously
One of my developer interns only ever uses the visual Git plugin in IntelliJ. It seems to work for him, but I can’t figure it out at all for the life of me; something about the visuals made it so difficult for me to parse. I’ll stick to my terminal, thanks.
Sometimes the brain just needs a big button. Other times the button is confusing even though it says exactly what it does.
I prefer a GUI for most stuff. They’re way more discoverable, you don’t have to memorize cryptic flags, and the mouse is just the more efficient input device to me.
Still I can use a terminal if I have to, that’s just part of the job to me.
I mean, I can - I know how, but boy having the GUI is nice. I can put a commit message title and a detailed message in a way that works well with my brain. Using two
-mflags will never click with me, and yes, I had to look it up again just to leave this comment.There’s a big difference between “prefers a GUI” and “incapable of/completely unwilling to use the CLI”
You can emit the
-mflag and a Texteditor will pop up, so that you can write multi-line commit messages.
Working as a dev, I have the same experience. The few times I’ve tried to bring Linux up as a viable option to the OS we’re all forced to use at work, and most of us hate using (Win11), there’s little to no interest. There’s a few Mac users on my team, but that’s about it. I think it’s that the majority of folks, even if they’re working in tech, simply don’t have enough of a reason to try something unfamiliar, which might cause them new and unknown problems, or require them to rethink how they use computes, on their own machines. Even though I’m pretty sure that most would prefer it, given some time.
They know macOS as an “easier alternative for normies”
Questionable amount of knowledge for techies if they aren’t aware that MacOS has a nearly full-blown FreeBSD inside. Then again, discourse on Reddit and Lemmy is the same way. But a lot of webdevs love MacOS, which also leads to tons of open-source utils for it, that I don’t have to download as binaries from a site last updated in 2016.
There’s a sorta-famous photo from CERN, from early 2010s, with a room full of folks who work there, all with Macbooks. A dude I know went to CERN sometimes for his university, and came to me with a question of why he’s seen so many Macs there. I explained that it’s a Unix but with a GUI made for people.
Yeah after almost 20 years of mandatory winslop workstation use, I finally had the opportunity to get a Mac work laptop. It’s night and day. Still not Linux, and I had to learn a new UX in record time but at least everything I need and the environment I’m familiar with runs natively instead of having to fight this WSL shit every hour of every day.
That’s kind of an astounding anecdotal batch of experience, you sure more of those folks don’t know Linux better?
Similar position… Definitely accurate from my experience as well. There’s a couple that clearly know, but a lot that don’t even though they are deep in tech fields.
Same position and agree
Honestly, except from some old graybeards who worked on AIX for 30 years, I’m usually the only one in any given squad who can write shell scripts. Now of course they slop GHA shell scripts and wonder why performance is shit.
Yep, i can confirm this, many programmers i know are like this
wtf
Computer scientists don’t understand this. This is systems.
Seriously, I have met computer scientists who admit they don’t know how the computer works, but simply is processional math.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking.
Computer science doesn’t mean you know how to a use a computer; astronomers and microbiologists don’t know much about telescopes and microscopes.
And CS students have the dumbest “smart” questions.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking
I mean, computer science is basically the mathematics of computation. It’s not like the people working on knot theory or topology are great with 3d art or knitting
Computer science has many fields and those even differ per country. Theoretical computer science is only one part of it. There are also many specialisations.
But you make a good point about topology and knot theory.
Most cs degrees I’ve seen, including my own include an operating systems course.
“How a computer works”
It really depends what you mean, and at what depth; theres a tone of stuff in there. Even then I think your mostly wrong, you just notice/remember the ones who are inept at using their computer.
If you mean run program x on os y, well then sure
I work in the IT department at a university. Can confirm that many comp sci majors have no idea how a computer works, or even how to install an operating system. They sure know how to write code though.
Friend’s dad has a phD in computer science thought that iphones have a plasma screen
‘Is this a windows computer’ ‘No this is a dell computer’
oh mine is a “dy”
New HP logo is indeed infuriating.
Don’t forget Temple OS
written in holy C
I started a class this year, a forensics class related to computers. The intro prompt is interesting, what computer do you have, windows or mac?
Yeah but you’re probably using a custom Linux distro (I forgot what it’s called now) to investigate either a Windows or a Mac system because that’s what everyone else has, and you’re not investigating yourself.
You’re probably thinking of Kali Linux 😅?
Yeah yeah that’s it. It’s not a very good destro generally speaking for general use but cyber investigations it seems to be the go-to.
I’ll be finding out in the next few weeks hehe
Yeah the avg people won’t even know about the TempleOS
Poor godless fools.
i used https://marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-generator/ to remake it:
(posted here in !linuxmemes@lemmy.world)
One of the two is bound to be Hannah Montana linux
I would be surprised if the average person knows even one operating system, including the ones they use
i am pretty sure quite few people would not notice at all if you changed their windows for kde, as long as the same icons were on the same place on desktop.
That is true, don’t even need to change icons.
Years ago when I lived with my parents I had my mother’s desktop setup with a dual boot testing things in KDE 3. Went to get a snack and came back to my mother sitting there playing kmahjongg.
She spent two hours playing kmahjongg and kpatience before she yelled wanting to know where her microsoft picture-it was. Never even noticed she wasn’t in Windows.
I know this happens often but I still struggle to accept that it’s possible
The fuck is BSD?
sincerely: a non-technical mint user
A separate family of operating systems. It’s a direct decendant of the old UNIX. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are the most common distributions.
It shares a lot of the same userspace tools as Linux (the GNUserspace, if you will), so if you’re used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance. However, the underlying mechanisms can feel a bit strange at first once you try it out.
I used FreeBSD as my daily driver back in the day, but now I’m also on Mint, mostly because I used linux more at work.
I’ve been meaning to check out BSD these days to see how far it’s come since I last used it 20ish years ago, I just haven’t gotten around to it.
I also remember hearing someone say that there are two things from Berkley that messes with your head: BSD and LSD.
Well I sure used to like LSD, but I get the feeling that I’m not qualified for Berkeley’s other offering.
the GNUserspace, if you will
You know I won’t.
if you’re used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance
Until one runs into “unknown option --help” and the multitude of other quality-of-life improvements that at least FreeBSD never ported. I frankly doubt it that they changed a noticeable amount in that department in the past twenty years.
Basically Macos
In a strictly semantic way it is technically true; It is the basic building block of what later became the basic building block of macos
Okay, imagine Linux. But (most of) the whole thing developed at once rather than just the kernel and tools separately.
AND:
- GNU licenses: companies use code and contribute because it may help
- BSD licenses: companies that use code shouldn’t contribute because it sucks
The average person has tried four or five different operating systems.
- The one preinstalled on their computer.
- The one preinstalled on their phone.
- The one preinstalled on their smart TV.
- ???
I wasn’t being serious, but I guess you can add in preinstalled on their gaming console
Insecure kitchen appliances.
What about Solaris? Irix? OS/2? BeOS? Certainly people have at least a passing awareness of the most popular OSes. I mean, I wouldn’t expect VMS to be on their list, but…
What about Solaris?
Never happened. Didn’t exist. Nope.
