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TC on open source evangelists (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by morrowind@lemmy.ml to c/foss@beehaw.org

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TechConnectify@mas.to - Oh my gosh I just figured it out.

Okay, all you open source evangelist people: your knee-jerk reaction to come at people who are talking about a problem with whatever commercial software they use and suggest Your Favorite Alternatives™ is exactly like saying "why don't you just buy a house?" to someone complaining about their landlord.

TechConnectify@mas.to - Actually, to borrow from @DoubleA, it's worse than that.

It's like talking to someone who is in a crappy apartment as though they have the agency and skills to stake out a plot of land and build their own home.

You have to be at peace with the fact that some people just want to exist and not worry about so many things. And they still have a right to complain about their situation.

Link to thread: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111539959265152243

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[–] Thevenin@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This.

Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.

The bugs currently plaguing me include:

Steam's UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
Discord won't share audio during screen sharing anymore.

But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:

Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.

For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that's mostly because I'm lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.

The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.