I’ve literally had to explain the existence of other operating systems than Windows to people. They had never heard of Linux.
Have you ever heard something like saying “His Windows is Linux”?
An upgrade to having never heard of Linux but also a downgrade somehow
I’ve heard “what is Windows?” from a Windows user.
…to be fair, it’s not like the name is plastered all over one’s experience with their PC most of the time, so how would they know?
A long time ago (I cannot find it anymore, may have been deleted) I read a “tale from tech support” where a user called tech support and complained “my operating system is missing”. Retelling from memory:
Tech support person tried to walk the user through various steps until the user said “ok, let me just close these documents…”
“Wait, you have open documents? Your operating system is not missing.”
“What? No, it is. If your operating system were missing, you wouldn’t be able to do anything with your computer, you wouldn’t have open documents. If you can do that, you definitely have some operating system. What version of Windows is the computer running?”
“Windows 7.”
“There you have it, that’s your operating system.”
“That’s Windows, not operating system.”
Oh, that’s a good one. I’m very far from being tech savvy myself, so I gradually tried to remind myself people can not care enough about this stuff to learn even some basic terminology or have other, more urgent concerns. A lot of the service industry depends on this kind of unfamiliarity, I guess.
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
The average person has tried four or five different operating systems.
The average person distro hopped at least 3 times before they settled on Mint.
the average person has tried 0.7 operating systems
But do they even know they have tried them?
I was definitely being silly. The average person doesn’t even know operating systems exist.
Is it Georg again?
- The one preinstalled on their computer.
- The one preinstalled on their phone.
- The one preinstalled on their smart TV.
- ???
Insecure kitchen appliances.
I wasn’t being serious, but I guess you can add in preinstalled on their gaming console
If it makes you feel better, you’re probably overestimating their interest in whatever it is.
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.
I think the curriculum is different depending on the country or university. But in Brazil, most CS students have a discipline on operating systems or computer architecture, even if they don’t get very deep.
However me as a Computer Engineer graduate, I’ve learned a lot about circuit analysis, signal processing, control systems, analog and digital electronics, microcontrollers, FPGAs, electronic chip manufacturing, etc. Most of the stuff which I forgot anyway, since it’s been a while since I started working as a backend software engineer.
I went to school for CIS and minored in CS.
So, I am redoing the network at the corporate office. The “networking guru” had ran Cat5e parallel to the power lines.
We were running speed tests on the lines, which were dialup speeds
So their IT team went to lunch, and I used the network cable on the CS major’s computer to test speeds while they were on lunch.
Because it was a pain to get to, and I didn’t know how soon I would need it again, I laid the cable on top of his keyboard.
I used the cable three more times.
So, now I am punching down a keystone when they get back from lunch, and the CS major (god, I watched this in awe) moved the network cable off the keyboard and tried to pull up a site. “THE NETWORK IS DOWN, THE NETWORK IS DOWN!”
The network guru starts to flip and says it is working for him.
By this time, I had gotten up and grabbed the network cable and plugged it back in. “Try again, you should be up.”
“Oh, well, I am more of a software than hardware guy.”
The fucking network cable was on your keyboard.
But this is the same jackass that wrote a program which was very simple but created it with an Installshield wizard and a PDF that just told you to hit next.
It took him a day and a half. By the time we received it, we had already implemented my script. Took me 20 minutes.
Kiddos, this was way before AI.
Separate story; there was a girl who was majoring in CS who was part of a DnD group. She was about to graduate.
She was asking about copper, silver, and gold.
Pretty simple: 100 cp == 1 slv, 100 slv == 1 g
Just orders of magnitude. She just couldn’t wrap her head around it. “That’s too much math.”
Dude, you are in a field based on math.
She disliked me because I said sardonicallu, “you know the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion? Kind of works like that, with fewer zeros involved.”
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
If that’s true then how come I see non-programmers talk about the somewhat obscure OS developer, Dick Pick, all the time?
‘Is this a windows computer’ ‘No this is a dell computer’
oh mine is a “dy”
New HP logo is indeed infuriating.
Are these really overestimations?
So are you Mac or windows?
I’m not a crappy OS.
I touch computers every day - with my hands! Anyone else want to admit to it?
I finger my keyboard daily.
When I started working for a MSP 15 years ago, the world of corporations introduced me to AS/400 (or iSeries, or IBM i). It’s not that obscure as big corporations are still using it, but I never heard of it before starting working for big businesses.
Ah, one of my first jobs involved coming in earlier than everyone else and starting up the inventory management program on the AS/400. Never even saw the machine itself, just connected via command prompt through my desktop and typed in some instructions.
Don’t forget Temple OS
uhhhh temple os
bask in its glory
written in holy C
I use my own custom made OS called PenOS that doesn’t even really work or do anything useful, but it does spam the word PENIS across your screen forever.
This feels like it was made by someone who was bored during their shift at the help desk lol
i’m reading this comment while bored at the helpdesk lol
Yeah the avg people won’t even know about the TempleOS
Most of them haven’t even set up Arch
no way
I use Plan 9 BTW
Poor godless fools.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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”
You can emit the
-mflag and a Texteditor will pop up, so that you can write multi-line commit messages.
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.
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.
Yep, i can confirm this, many programmers i know are like this
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
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.
