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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 bring this up at my job all the time. I work as a software tester, and I’m constantly reminding our BA that most customers aren’t smart enough to “just know not to do that”
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.
Is the average person unaware of Linux and Firefox?!
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)
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 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.
i think that’s true of most people in any generation, honestly. gen alpha isn’t uniquely tech illiterate in my experience.
it’s anecdotal, but my father is gen x and basically only uses his phone and tablet. meanwhile i know a gen alpha kid who pirated windows 11 pro for the remote desktop functionality so he could afk in roblox while playing minecraft… or 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.
Then you have some young people going back to flip phones… they’re likely the ones getting laptops, possibly even refurb.
Yes
People may have heard of these things, but I don’t think most people could give an accurate description of what they are.
Yeah, this I would totally agree with.
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.
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.
I don’t think that’s true on windows. If I have a PDF with a .PNG extension and try to open it it will fail regardless of the headers in the file itself.
Windows file manager opens things in apps based on file extensions, and then it’s up to the apps to figure out what to do with it. I did a bit of testing, and it seems like Firefox is fine with opening JPEGs mislabeled as PNGs, but not PDFs mislabeled as PNGs. LibreOffice Draw is fine with that though, so if in windows I set that as my default for PNG files, it opens a PDF labelled as a PNG perfectly normally (and can also open actual PNGs normally).
If I just completely delete the extension from a PNG or PDF, Firefox will open either correctly.
“Filesystem? You mean the downloads folder? Yes I know about it. You just tap the Files app”
💀
I’m going to assume that you didn’t study a STEM subject?
Computer Science
I can assure you there are lots of people in computer science that don’t know what linux, foss or firefox are.
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 remember seeing that airplane on the VHS all the time at the video store
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.
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…
You overestimate the amount of people who actually use a computer.
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
I remember my uncle using Firefox, so I thought people heard about Firefox of 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 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
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.
You can’t use it without the custom cursor? Doesn’t seem important
It’s actually super important, the cursor in question is the one that you’re supposed to get when you select “Freehand draw”, without it you’d basically just have stock designs.
It could be worth trying to run it using Proton instead of just stock WINE. Obviously no guarantee it would work but there’s a lot that’s been put into the Proton project to make games work better and something like a custom cursor seems in the realm.
https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher
I’d try it in the umu launcher project.
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/)
Firefox and, Opera my beloved, was the thing during the 2010s
I found it funny how condescending all the foss nerds have been to the problems in the LTT linux video. So many people were mad that someone unfamiliar with linux didnt know everything and have a perfect experience. The worst part was they had this opinion and attacked the user while demonstrating they had absolutely no idea what the issues were caused by and could have easily run into the same issue.
Are we talking about that original one? Where he tried Pop!_OS and tried to install Steam and the package installer gave a big message that something wasn’t right, so he chuckled, TL;DR’d and hit “yes anyway” and was shocked he borked his install?
That LTT?
I’m never gonna fault somebody for unfamiliarity, but we should absolutely fault people, especially ones with any tech experience, for not reading helpful messages right in front of them.
Both. Neither are what I would expect to be the new users fault. The warning message was vauge. You are about to do something potentially harmful is a warning that comes up on a ton of things like deleting a user or a folder. usually you think about what you’re doing an if you know what you’re doing then you proceed. He thought he was just installing steam and so he proceeded.
i am reminded about this one time i was doing desktop support at a hospital. super smart doctor was having a problem and i asked them to recreate the problem for me
oh they did… and instantly clicked the error away when it showed up and then instantly looked at my for an answer
i asked them to do it again, same
i was flabbergasted… i had to point out that i need to know what that error was
“oh it’s the same thing it always says” was the reply
thankfully i understood the the workflow and asked to sit and recreated the error again… AND guess what? IT FUCKING TOLD THEM EXACTLY HOW TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEM
wow i would hide a note in my chest cavity before they do surgery on me
a bloody slip of paper hidden within my ribcage, enscribed “learn how to read, idiot!”
To be fair, LTT has had a very long history of shitting on Linux, while giving Windows a free pass.
I dont think thats being fair and I dont think that is true. Linux users perceive a video showing real issues on linux to be shitting on linux but do not consider a video that contains windows issues to be shitting on windows.
I’m talking about the LTT staff.
Proof of this is that for ten years, they published zero videos specifically about Windows shortcomings, but they did I believe two separate Linux “challenges”, where the main conductor was Windows users complaining about Linux. And while I agree that some of the complaints were legitimate, many others, like UX differences compared to Windows, definitely are not.
watch the 30 day windows challenge or the tons of videos about various windows bugs. In what would would we expect their coverage of windows to be the same as linux? Windows is used by majority of their audience it doesnt have the same preconceived notions that linux has so the approach will be different. They have no shortage of negative coverage of windows shortcomings, its issues, its bugs.
There are no 30 day windows challenge videos?
There are a bunch of videos about how to configure windows “the right way”, which, to me, seems like a way of coping with the negative side of windows without questioning it too much.
And look, I get that windows users may have trouble with Linux. But LTT have been overly critical and even dismissive of Linux for the longest time. There are videos as recent as 2022 where some of the complains about Linux were straight up “I don’t like how this works”.
Ok I tried to find this and you’re right there isnt a 30 day window challenge. I could have sworn there was but I was wrong. I still dont think LTT is overly critical of linux and im a regular viewer and WAN show listener. There is usually a few linux shills on staff dropping references and shitting on windows.
That’s why I find posts here like “Fast-MBysoon is getting a major update!” funny. The amount of times they just assume you know what it is and then you go into the comments and the only one is “care to say what Fast-MBysoon is?” So many FOSS users just assume everyone knows about their Microkernel-Based YAML Synchronisation Object Notifier project is.
That’s why I try to show people I know how to get FOSS alternatives for their everyday apps. It takes a bit of patience but trust me when I say this: Most people are more tech savvy than you think, they just don’t wanna go through a judging community.
The “who still uses Google?” crowd forgets most people just want their computer to work, not become a weekend side quest.
I get the point, but going away from Google search is so easy.
Gmail on the other hand I understand why people are still stuck using and I don’t push them to switch away.
But it drives me nuts that some normies in my life will complain that Google has gone worse, still refuse to switch. There are some who don’t know how to change default and I still get it, but there is one mf at my work, he changed his default in edge from bing to Google and when I said since you know how to change default why not use DDG or startpage or honestly any other non giant alternative. He just says too much work.
Gmail was about easiest to switch away from. You can just create a new email account and have two mailboxes. Then update the new email to services as they go.
With banks and financial services in general being a bitch about changing contact details. That’s a form and a visit to the branch for each bank, broker, investment advisor, direct fund provider. That’s already almost 30 applications. I haven’t even counted stuff like vehicular services, government tax portal, property tax portal, electricity provider, gas provider, internet provider. Not all of whom allow changing for email address digitally or without some complicated support ticket.
It’s such a mountain of changes I myself have only gotten through the list halfway and it’s been 4 years of trying. I can never recommend that to anyone in my family, they’ll just hate me.
P.s. This might just be my country specific problem, I understand other countries are easier.
I think it might be specific to your country and it sucks.
Here, banks are required to ask you to update your contact details once a year. You just log in as usually and sometimes they just give you a form to fill out with your phone number, email, physical address and stuff. If it’s unchanged, you leave it all unchanged.
Wow never thought about that, I changed it to all those digitally and it didn’t require much at all. One service required me to send an email and that felt a bit old-fashioned, but nothing like you described.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
My country does have identity theft problem running rampart, so I don’t totally blame the services, it’s a pain but at least a leaked email password here and there wouldn’t automatically mean losing access to finance. I understand why it’s been designed such a way, but man it’s a such a mountain of a task.
oh man it sures takes all my weekend to install firefox and set a search engine
Nonsensical argument. Just because a piece of software is FLOSS and non-Google, it is not automatically a “weekend side quest”. Big Tech is very happy that these false equivalencies have spread as well as they did, but they don’t hold a kernel of truth, at least not anymore.
Honestly, switching search engines is pretty normie friendly. I’ve got a lot of non-techy friends or family, that use Ecosia or something. They also did it on their own, I didn’t even encourage them to do it.
With things like Linux it’s a bit harder. But if they don’t rely on any specialized software, they are usually fine with me offering to upgrade their Laptops so Linux. I installed Linux Mint on my Mom’s Laptop and she can use it as well as Windows. She never complained about it.
lokening???
It comes from anglish “loken” meaning to heal, it is related to Old English “læce” IPA /ˈlæː.t͡ʃe/ meaning doctor.
Thanks!
What’s an oakframe, though?
I made the oakframe in an attempt to loken Gaja. It’s a project focusing particularily on the role of the language in how we bring about transformative change, for example through relighting and sighsteer. The question that the oakframe asks us is; How do we move our attention away from the destructive towards lokening.
The oakframe sais Gaja is unwell because of structures of migth which we call the machine, but it also sais that this machine is socially constructed, and so we have the change force to dissolve these structures. The construction of the machine happens through our language and how the language paints our world.
I don’t have an official spot for posting about the oakframe right now, because I’m still in the discovery process. I’m also primarily developing it in norwegian.
While I have some concerns about this idea - for one, while using new words like “waxt” as a relighting [replacement?] for “mastery” might be more poetic, it might be easier to spread the acorns of the oakframe with existing words like “skill” - it’s still an interesting one.
Have you considered creating a Lemmy/PieFed community for the oakframe to notify people when you do create an official spot for posting about it?
You are right in challenging the words that I’m using. The oakframe is highly experimental, and so there will be words that ends up not getting traction. It is part of the process. It’s similar to how you have to allow yourself make mistakes when trying to do a new waxt. Flawlessness prevents growth.
I think that the word “waxt” has potential; It is culturally rooted in Old English, and works in norwegian as the word “vekst”. Words like these are easy to translate and keeps their poetic nature because the images of the words are universal and all languages has these images.
Thank you for your suggestions! Right now, I’m just posting a little bit everywhere to increase the exposure in different communities and see what resonates. It would be good to have a place to post, but what I really need is honest feedback.
Ok so how different is Firefox from any other web browser? Seems like the basics are all pretty similar. Address bar, bookmarks, click links. But maybe I am showing my bias here. What am I missing?
Chrome based browsers are riddled with privacy invasive features, data collection etc…
Also, ad blocking in chrome is crippled purposely because Google wants ad revenue.
Firefox has less of these anti features, and there are plenty of Firefox derivatives that have none of them.
don’t forget that some of chrome is encrypted and only Google gets to see the sauce
where as all of Firefox is available to look at, but it’s a mess of years and years of building, so it’s impossible to understand unless you’re dedicated
Yeah…
I think that if you are in this meme, you’re either wrong and thinking too highly of yourself, or you need to touch grass there’s no way a normal person actually acts that way
oh no. this tool is too good.
!fedimemes@feddit.uk would love this
just one loop they don’t know about all the others
oh whoops
it’s just whoop
The Kim Jong side eye is great, almost like the Fry futurama meme.
But those notepads. Always with the notepads.
it’s different when they become informed and choose to remain part of the problem for convinience ☹️
Why? I can fully unterstand a person working a hard job, having family and more than a handful of things to care about saying to themselves “Nah… no time or energy to look into that, I use what already works”
The real problem is when people gatekeep cool open source projects. Not a great way to grow a community.
Gatekeeping is sometimes necessary, otherwise you end up with a project that was cool at some time in the past.
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.
