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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
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.”
“Filesystem? You mean the downloads folder? Yes I know about it. You just tap the Files app”
💀
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.
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/)
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…
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?” 😑