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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.
My experience with the Linux communities here has been the opposite. Very welcoming, and very helpful.
Wait, who was making that claim?
I had a quick look, and all I could see is this post Taleya made where no-one made those claims.
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.
What I find more disrespectful is people that join the greater community, but who have no appreciation for the giant amount of philosophical and political (on-top of the technical) work that was done to enable the relatively free/libre and open environment we have with Linux-based operating systems today. I find it so sad that GNU haters have successfully established divisive memes such as the Stallman GNU/Linux copypasta. We owe so much to the GNU project and GPL license, and I think we would be in a much worse place today if Linux had not been licensed under the GPL. I am fundamentally opposed to people who try to move the distributions into a less free direction. Some may see this as elitism, but this opposition is not born out of a desire to dominate or humiliate anyone, but rather to protect the many great achievements of the FLOSS movement.
when more and different people get involved for different reasons then they will change things. since a lot of growth has come from nearby gamer communities, they will bring those habits and forms with them.