This feels like it was made by someone who was bored during their shift at the help desk lol
Don’t forget Temple OS
written in holy C
uhhhh temple os
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.
I’ll be finding out in the next few weeks hehe
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 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
‘Is this a windows computer’ ‘No this is a dell computer’
oh mine is a “dy”
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.
Friend’s dad has a phD in computer science thought that iphones have a plasma screen
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.
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.
Exactly
I swear I saw a comment around here that said “the average user does not want bloatware like systemd on their computer” and I just kind of wonder if we are all living on the same planet sometimes.
I live in debianland
“The average person probably only knows systemd and one or two generations of sysvinit” “and upstart of course” “of course”
The average user installs fucking TikTok on their computer
and plays candy crush unironicly
That…can’t have been real and serious
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!
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…
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
If history is any lesson, the universe will win.
Adams was truly a modern philosopher of great note.
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.
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 that’s true then how come I see non-programmers talk about the somewhat obscure OS developer, Dick Pick, all the time?
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.
My dad has been running Linux Mint for almost 10 years now and he doesn’t know that LibreOffice isn’t “Linux.”
We have the same dad?
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.
Yeah the avg people won’t even know about the TempleOS
Poor godless fools.
Most of them haven’t even set up Arch
I use Plan 9 BTW
no way
Nah that dude is just a post Unix purist about to launch into a 3 hour talk about how Plan 9 is (not was) the future.
GNU Hurd OS is the future though
My parents know one and it’s windows. One time my dad messaged me at work to ask if his laptop had windows xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11, so he doesn’t even know the version differences :p
My mom may also say “samsung” as an operating system if you prod enough, but she also knows their laptop has windows 11, so she knows more than my dad
So that’s what the average non-tech person thinks about OSes
When I was a child, Windows 95 came out and people bought it without owning a computer, deciding they would get a household PC now.
That level of hype is biblical and it sticks.
Edit: Then of course, Bill openly said he likes Windows being pirated because it would be the OS of choice of everyone. People would only know Windows.
Yeah. A typical non-tech person is just as likely to say their PC is running on Microsoft or Google. Maybe they’ll say Edge if they are really knowledgeable.
I worked tech support in a call center, a thousand years ago.
Telling people to click on the “big blue E” was used nearly every call. Not much has changed.
In the case of the browser, they are still only describing use, not brand name.
They don’t know what a browser is. That’s just “The Internet”.
Edit: I got whooshed.
I was making a joke about edging.
Edit: It was pretty subtle, to be honest. Not my finest masturbation-related humor.
Your dad seems miles ahead knowing windows versions compared to the average person.
I mean he was trying to run software which listed those as compatible, so he just copied the list :3
But yeah, thinking about windows versions at all is already a step ahead some
Most of them are unaware of what an OS is even.
For real! I’m still unable to explain what an OS is to my 14-yo daughter. I tried several analogies but I always have the impression she says she gets it just to shut me up so she can carry on watching Tiktok videos.
Yep, my first level tech support experience absolutely confirms this. The question what operating system the client uses has gotten me a wide variety of answers, and most of them did not have anything to do with operating systems.
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.
Yep, i can confirm this, many programmers i know are like this
It’s first in the last few years we’ve begun seeing somewhat stable gaming distros for Linux, which doesn’t require a ton of fiddling for every single game.
Yet kernel level anti cheat is still an issue, so if you want to play some of the big PvP games. There’s a lot of inconvenience to get them rolling
I wouldn’t take a developer who can’t write git commit from command line seriously
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”
It’s most of them from my experience.
I’ve never seen a group of people who are more resistant to learning about their own hobby then techy people.
They learn their workflow they settle in and then just refuse to learn anything else at all.
The Linux community is only slightly better with that…
It’s baffling
It’s not their hobby. It’s their fucking job.
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.
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.
Sometimes the brain just needs a big button. Other times the button is confusing even though it says exactly what it does.
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.
wtf
That’s kind of an astounding anecdotal batch of experience, you sure more of those folks don’t know Linux better?
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.
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
MacOS has less “hiccups” when running containers compared to windows. We can’t run Linux as main os on our machines because support doesn’t want to support that, so we run it in docker for our dev work.
A BSD. There are multiple
