Submitted 1 day ago by Fleur_@aussie.zone to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
makes sense, since Linux users (me) are drawn to foss projects like moths to a light
Literally me
The moth don’t care when he sees the flame
Same
I am not tech literate but here I am.
imposter
ඞ
I think your underestimating your skills over the general public.
I literally have an all Apple ecosystem.
I find the echo chamber to be nice when it is semi tech-minded people that aren’t an unending diatribe of reposted wholesome stories/fake chatgpt posts/godawful jokes in the comments that stopped being funny in 2012.
I agree. It feels like Hacker News; it’s better than having the general public saying stupid things in every comment.
For the past month I’ve been developing a NixOS platform for local businesses.
I keep overestimating how much people know. It’s infuriating trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I don’t need to explain why it’s amazing, just that it is, and it works. I feel like I’m Mugatu talking to Zoolander at times.
Even if I could perfectly analogise what a declarative operating system is, it wouldn’t matter to a client because they don’t understand how a non NixOS machine works.
Though, the worst part is trying to explain to someone, who is “happy with Windows” why they should not be.
How the fuck do people in 2025 not fucking loathe Windows? There’s fucking ads in the start menu. There’s like 4 different places to change settings. The systems bloat and slow to a crawl as the OS ages.
It’s fucked.
Easy, they got slowboiled since the Vista era.
Windows sucks ass so bad nowadays. I put windows 98 on a vm the other day and its literally better ui and function than 11. Not to mention, no Spyware and ads.
I’ve explained NixOS to non-tech business owners by treating it like any other piece of equipment. You want to upgrade your widget stamping machine? Buy and install the new machine that meets all the specs and stamp some widgets with it. Only after you’re satisfied that it works do you remove the old one.
Relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/2501/
I just don’t understand how it’s more “techy” than Reddit. I just want our user count to keep going up.
I think we should focus less on hyping federation/decentralization and more on how there are no ads and the content is really coming from actual users (and maybe a leftist bias).
I got a few friends on here by explaining that choosing a server is no different from choosing an email provider. Everyone understands email, that you can communicate with most other email users no matter what their provider is.
The Leftist bias is a selling point? That’s literally all social media except Twitter
You know I don’t think the whole “everyone understands email” is the gotcha that most people think it is. I honestly don’t think everyone understands email, much less the underlying structure that can be compared to Lemmy.
Almost no one understands email I would be surprised if the number is higher then 7 or 8 percent of users that use email understand what it even is beyond the basic statement of “it’s like a letter”.
People barely understand how mail works in the first place.
Email is that thing where I send birthday postcards from right?
It’s federated. Have to choose your instance and create an account. Then not to mention what happens if your instance shuts down.
*with strong beliefs on random topics
I’ll die on the veganism hill. I don’t care. I’ll take as many of y’all with me as I can.
It’s always so saddening to see the kneejerk reactions of people on here to downvote whenever veganism is even mentioned. At least that’s been my experience
This is why I fkn love this place, my internet home
It totally is. That’s why I’m here. Depending on the server, you also get a side of non-authoritarianism and strong privacy beliefs.
About the time they get a list of services to pick for sign up, they lose interest or freeze, exhibiting decision paralysis. That one time they installed ImagineDragns.exe and the computer had to be taken to be cleaned, set them down a path of I don’t know what this is, I won’t touch it that keep us employed.
Exactly; that’s why I’m here. That said, I would like to see other communities grow. !games@lemmy.world and !squaredcircle@lemmy.world, for instance.
Ditto. And they keep pumping up Linux and refusing to accept that not everyone is tech savvy.
Nothing wrong with that given a multi billion dollar scheme to trap people with Copilot.
I’m currently trying to usb boot an old Motherboard from 2011 that has a very early version of UEFI. Modern disk imagers do fancy partitions that aren’t recognized by this ancient artifact. Just saying it can be challenging.
I have an old motherboard where I (the smartass) thought would be better off buying an PCIe expansion card to support NVMe [Which would free up one of my SATA port consumed by the OS Boot SSD].
GUESS WHAT, this piece of shit doesn’t support booting from PCIe.
I am pretty upset.
I am not tech literate like most programmers or coders, but I can look up things and read. Usually covers most of my needs overall, so it’s better than nothing. Where I work I am seen as on par with any IT person but I just literally read instructions and follow them. Tried to explain it, but they treat it like I was blessed by the tech gods or something.
I’m almost offended for my profession. Most of the programmers I know are quite tech literate, to thr point it floors me when I find a coworker who is tech illiterate. Like, brother, its literally our job.
If you can do this you are better than, must tech supports i have worked with.
My own experience, as someone who is not necessarily tech illiterate, but also not an expert either:
I decided to check out some basic Linux stuff, and found a post directing newcomers to a website that was supposed to be a top-notch beginner’s guide. This guide started with a history of Linux, written in the style of an early 2000s GameFAQs guide. It then jumped immediately into selecting a distro, and started describing each option with terms like "lightweight"and “robust” without explaining what those terms meant in that context - or even defining what a distro was in the first place.
As someone who has used Windows for around 3 decades, I could make some inferences to fill in the gaps. But I imagine someone with less experience with PCs would get completely lost.
Now on the flip side, I’ve also shared in another thread the story of how I lost interest in programming partway through my introductory university course, and mostly received positive feedback. The folks in that thread seemed happy to hear the perspective of an outsider.
Ironically a windows veteran can give you a better introduction to Linux than a Linux veteran.
since the front page consists of linux and survillance hate
I find that very attractive. It also keeps certain people away.
This used to be what people said about digg and then about reddit
early days Reddit and the whole Digg vs Reddit thing was wild. I remember someone made like a stupid long comic about digg vs reddit. and yeah Early reddit was much like what Lemmy is now.
I don’t know how to code, but I know my way around computers.
I use Linux because I’m too tech illiterate for Windows, I needed something that just worked out of the box
Unbelievably based take
Techies are shaking and crying right now
Well that sometimes keeps the conversation clean though. Most computer people seem to be a little more intelligent than the average person.
Maybe they might be slightly above the norm in the past, regarding intelligence, but that bell curve flattened out in the early 2000’s. Shit, you rarely need to manage memory anymore.
Shit, I forgot no one’s writing raw assembly anymore
Lack of diversity can create stagnation problems and biases that go unchallenged, which is why you see communities with barriers of entry always seem to have very specific kinds of cultures or attitudes.
For better or worse.
Intelligence isnt a linear scale. There are so many skills out there, so many things to learn. You might consider tech people more intelligent because the skills they have are the ones you recognise as intelligent.
Very much so, when I brought up that I am a software developer who just loves using their Macbook, because it just works, I was told I stupid because I am now locked in and what if I want to compile my own flavor of window manager, like with no sense of fucking irony.
Hey, you do you. I refuse to use anything apple related, but I’ll be damned if they don’t make great hardware and extremely convenient ecosystem.
I want an iphone just for the convenience factor, but having dogshit integration with my android smartwatch/devices means I will never buy into Apple. Probably for the best.
Dicking around with a shit-box laptop running a barebones os all day and then opening my Mac book pro makes me question if this whole Linux thing really is it.
And then I have to install a niche program and apple calls in an airstrike on my position and I remember why I have the shit-box all over again.
I don’t like being “locked in” but there’s no alternative for a super light laptop with 10+ hours battery and good touchpad.
Tbh, I wanted to go with Framework, as I very much like the upgrade ability and reducing e-waste, unfortunately at the time they didn’t ship to my country only some neighboring EU countries and while I could have made that work as a private purchase, I was purchasing through my company and there I couldn’t make it work, so it was a choice between something like the Dell XPS ( which has notorious touchpad failures) pr the macbook pro, so then it was an easy choice.
The average person nowadays could not create and reliably access a Facebook account if they didn’t have auto complete/password save.
The worst is twenty-year-olds that have never used a desktop. They just state at the mouse, keyboard, and monitor like they have no clue what to do.
Nah, I’m an idiot XD
I can live with that.
“Whats the best tool for…”
“Linux!!!”
“Haven’t yet said what I’m trying to build”
“Pls just upvote me and tell me I’m good”
Nah, I’m only partially tech literate. I don’t know how in the fuck to use a terminal or command line stuff.
But I know what HTTPS is and how to check the header of an email to know if its phishing. I know how to use and manage PGP keys (although I have zero people to communicate with so I end up never using it, in practice).
Boot from USB is just spamming one of the F1 F2 F11 F12 button repeatedly then select the USB, very easy, learned that in 2 minutes using a web search.
But don’t ask me to set up a Lemmy Instance, I aint got the brain power for it, I’m likely to mess up setting up the security aspect of it then a hacker is gonna deface it like lemmy.world that time when they got hacked. I actually have zero clue on how to set up self-host stuff. I don’t bother with a NAS, I just copy my photos, videos, movies, wikipedia .zim files via a USB cable directly to a portable SSD (I keep multiple copies of the same files). If I need my files on the go, I just take one of the SSDs and put it in my pocket. No NAS needed.
(Also NAS are kinda expensive, and you have to buy the drives separately, so the NAS thing is kinda just expensive stuff on top of the storage you already have to pay for, so I don’t bother, I love my portable SSDs)
My mom is a tech literate echo chamber lmao
in a simplified phrase, fediverse is the linux of social media
“don’t even know how to boot from USB” Are you serious with this post?
or at least navigate a directory through the command line
Why, obviously. I mean who hasn’t read through the ls(1) man page at least once?
When I first read this I thought the title was “tech illiterate” which I thought was a bit rude, but anecdotally true.
Sure we’ve got healthy linux and programmers communities, but I think most people are just regular degular folx.
They are as tech literate as they aren’t sport literate in my experience.
The fact that the community superbowl exists here to continue perpetuating a meme is peak irony. There are so few people interested in american football here that the intention has flipped, meaning a picture of an American football match would be funny.
its because we’re old people.
happydoors@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You are completely correct and their comments prove it. The bubble is strong here. But it’s a pretty nice bubble
Fleur_@aussie.zone 1 day ago
Very proud of all the special little techies in this thread who are definitely smart and different because they grew up troubleshooting a fax machine and not a touch screen display like the younguns of today.
P00ptart@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“God damnit!” Kicks and punches machine out of frustration
-machine starts working
“You fucking right, better run correct, or there’s more where that came from, bitch!”
Walks off like a gangster
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 1 day ago
At least we could get the fax machine to do things. The touch screen is so many layers of abstraction away from any raw functionality it’s like the pull string on a See and Say.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Bruh most people don’t even realize how much of modern healthcare still runs on fax machines. I didn’t even grow up with fax machines but I had to learn how to use them when I started my career. Most of our interactions with the government and pseudo government agencies for our involuntary / committed Psych patients is done by fax. The cops forgot to give us one of the pages we need when they dropped off a patient a few weeks ago and I found the NonEmerg line for their county and spamcalled their Dispatch at 2am until they faxed it to us.
This is all to say that nurses as a whole are extremely tech illiterate. Most healthcare workers are; they’ve spent a lot of time learning anatomy and physiology and have had very little time left in their schooling to learn tech stuff. I grew up using CL Linux so I do most of the 2am tech support for everything that doesn’t explicitly require IT credentials. The wildest thing to me was watching both older nurses AND younger nurses hunt and peck to type. I grew up using AIM to talk to my friends as a teenager and nothing will increase your fluency with something more than most of your teenage communication that way.
But it also means that I still have to go back to reddit to find people to properly empathize with me. As the OP says, a lot of these people can’t even empathize with the fact that I can’t find people here to empathize with. They just blame my fellow healthcare workers for not keeping up with technology. Like, cool, but I also just wanna be able to talk to them!
tomcatt360@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I still troubleshoot faxing on a semi-regular basis. I use them with Analog Telephone Adapters (ATAs) in lieu of Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) phone lines. They are, shall we say, special