The next comment was “What’s Linux?”

In fairness, there's a 70% chance this comment was posted by a bot that was, itself, being hosted on a Linux server.

I'm of two minds on this.

In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.

On the other hand it's so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.

They were one of the lucky 10,000.

Tbh depending on what subreddit and how long ago you saw that comment, it makes sense. I can't see the average 2010s techbro redditor that I remember not knowing what Linux is, but the 2020s more normie redditor, I could.

Yes? The number of people I met in college that doesn't even heard about firefox was surprising.

I would give it a coin-flip as to whether the average person could name their current OS. Not sure if I would have to give credit to people who respond "The Microsoft one" or "Google Phone" in order for that bet to be fair.

I had a client who was the head of product at her buisness. We'd meet at the end of every sprint to do demos and planning. Anyway when my team mentioned there were some issues on Firefox her knee jerk response was to openly say "I hate Firefox users"

I have tons of stories like that but the point is that even people who are aware don't universally love it

Awareness is just the bare minimum

Just on Firefox, dedepends on how old we are talking. Gen z? Probably not as they've mostly know Chrome as having been the best web browser. Old Millenials and young gen x know it as the next IE alternative after Netscape died. Old Gen X maybe depending on how old. Gen alpha and boomers, no way.

If knowledge of both is required, then even less so. Anytime I bring up Linux I get the feeling that it is like bringing up religion with a stranger.

Yes

People may have heard of these things, but I don't think most people could give an accurate description of what they are.

Most people I come across will have heard of it, but just know it as a browser, and don’t know anything about it being open source or more privacy respecting than chrome (ignoring the even more in-depth question of that still being the case)

I know this change probably happened gradually over the course of time, but it’s truly shocking to me how many people my age can’t do shit on a computer.

I’m in my mid 40s.

Like, this was understandable when I was a kid doing computer stuff and wowing all the adults - the PC was brand new. But people who are my age NOW grew up with this stuff all around them! Like, you didn’t know how to CLICK? You were born in 1983 what the fuck, Carol!

Systemd+Linux

Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.

I've taken to calling it 'The internet App' when talking to none techy people.

The real annoying one is getting people to find the "Start" button on Windows realizing it hasn't be branded that since XP.

Same, you're not gonna believe who i said it to... My networking classmate

just one loop they don't know about all the others

fedimemes@feddit.uk would love this

They just want to get the job done. The fact that they considered a note-taking app at all isn't universally normal. To this day my wife sends me messages in signal as a post-it to remember things, she could have just sent it to herself, but she used to do the same in sms and just applied that forward after I convinced her security was a good step.

We want the best, the nicest, the most useful thing. We apply the same rigor most non-technies use when choosing a car.

They want to fill a need that, at worst, bothers them a little.

All my work computers are provided by the companies I work for and per their rules I can only take and store notes using their approved software and on their servers which basically means I work on a locked down Microsoft ecosystem. Access to third party productivity software is simply not possible outside of certain role specific specialist software.

I would guess literally millions of employees have a similar setup so it's not that we are tech illiterate per say, but more accurately in the corporate world this option doesn't exist so there is no point trying.

Outside work my productivity tools consist of a Moleskine notebook with tasteful check paper.

I feel obligated to mention Logseq here. It's similar to obsidian, but FLOSS (AGPL-v3).

Honestly OneNote is pretty good for the people who like it though. I personally really can't stand rich text editing, I really need a raw view. If I didn't have those reservations I'd probably like OneNote more.

an open standard for all it’s files

All that and you still can't use the right "its".

Even the average tech person doesn't know what it means.
The term was coined by Christine Peterson of the Free software movement, and is defined to specify software that is free and open source (FOSS).
This was after problems with the term "free software" because it was a bad term, that was hijacked to also include software free of cost but closed and proprietary, so far from open source. And free was not generally understood as free as in libre.
After the Free software movement coined the term. The Free Software Foundation also adopted it, and to distinguish they called it FLOSS, for "Free as in Libre and Open Source Software", where the libre means that the code is protected from being "jailed" because it has a so called strong copyleft license, like for instance GPL. So MIT, BSD and public domain are not FLOSS but they are FOSS.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software

/Nothing in this life is simple.

Haha I'm an aspiring game dev and I know a little bit about a ton of software!

...and I suck at most of it. But I can hold a conversation about it at least! :D

P.S: Haven't heard of QGIS tho! My partner used ARCGIS though, and would always get annoyed when I pronounced it "Ark-jizz."

Psh, I've been on Linux for almost 20 years and I'm a guitarist lol

maybe orcaslicer for 3d printing people? seems like the most popular nowadays, although it's getting so fragmented with every manufacturer's own slicer branch..

yeah, this is hard

oh, people who do streaming or youtubing stuff probably know OBS

there's also probably a certain demographic for audacity

lots of people know about firefox, they would just never use it.

"download" might have triggered that

well, file:// is a thing. maybe.

Experience has taught me that Intelligence and Wisdom are very different things, and whilst the former can help get the latter faster, having lots of the former in no way form or shape guarantees any of the latter or even that one will get any of it.

I would even say that there's a level of high intelligence but not high enough (I mentally call them "Entry Level Geniouses") that leads people who think they're so much better than everybody else whilst not being intelligent enough to figure out the limits in capability and breath of use of intelligence alone, so they never figure out the whole "All I know is that I know nothing" and don't really start walking down the path to Wisdom. Elon Musk is probably a good example.

I've done this with a chromebook recently, first it depends on a model and how old is it. In general you need to disable secureboot in recovery menu, enable 'developer' mode, and allow booting from usb. After that you can install your distro.

When in doubt, Linux Mint.

If you are completely new don't yet. Find someone to guide you if you are experienced => https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/getting-started.htmlI had to do minor soldering for the ones I jailbroke

If I remember correctly you need to unlock the bootloader by taking the back off it and removing a screw. Then install MrChromebox firmware. Then you can flash a normal linux distro. Ignore all the chromebook specific ones they're all dead and unmaintained. Arch with Sway worked perfectly on my 2015 chromebook with 4gb of ram and the worst cpu ever.

If you haven't installed an OS before, probably find someone who knows what they're doing and ask for help.

Jailbreaking and installing a new OS on a Chromebook usually isn't a simple process, and it can be incredibly specific to the exact model of Chromebook you're working with. Installing Linux is the easy part. The difficult part is jailbreaking the device and installing a new bootloader that can handle non-ChromeOS software. And that process varies depending on what model of Chromebook you have. Some of them will require actual hardware modifications in order to do that, requiring disassembly and reassembly (mine did). For some Chromebooks, it's just not possible at all. And in most cases, there are risks of permanently bricking the device if you do it wrong.

If you can't find someone knowledgeable to hold your hand through it, then you'll need to do lots of research, and not just research into installing Linux on Chromebooks in general -- research into how to do it on your specific model of Chromebook and its specific chipset. Chromebooks are not at all standardized, and exactly what you need to do will depend on exactly which Chromebook you've got.

really depends and you really gotta research if it's even going to be worth your time. there's a site where you can check if your chromebook will work and how difficult it will be: https://docs.chrultrabook.com/

some you have to physically open up and mess with like a screw or two. some use other methods. that site will tell you specifically what you have to physically do to get it working.

Then you have to take into consideration the SSD you have on your chromebook. like will it even have enough space to do anything worthwhile. I put linux on a chromebook and honestly all it's good for is opening some terminals to do some basic things and maybe stream stuff online. that's it. And it can be a struggle to get linux installed so again is it worth your time to have something that could potentially be a glorified terminal station? up to you. Don't get me wrong it's a fun hobby project but that's about it.

VLC and Blender are not really alternatives tho, rather industry standard

All FOSS nerds that joined after 2020 only know OBS, charge they phone, distro hop, eat hot chip, and GUI.

libreoffice is getting there too

every pc i've used has had libreoffice, even at my job even though they have licenses for almost everything from microsoft

Nonsensical argument. Just because a piece of software is FLOSS and non-Google, it is not automatically a "weekend side quest". Big Tech is very happy that these false equivalencies have spread as well as they did, but they don't hold a kernel of truth, at least not anymore.

I get the point, but going away from Google search is so easy.

Gmail on the other hand I understand why people are still stuck using and I don't push them to switch away.

But it drives me nuts that some normies in my life will complain that Google has gone worse, still refuse to switch. There are some who don't know how to change default and I still get it, but there is one mf at my work, he changed his default in edge from bing to Google and when I said since you know how to change default why not use DDG or startpage or honestly any other non giant alternative. He just says too much work.

oh man it sures takes all my weekend to install firefox and set a search engine

Honestly, switching search engines is pretty normie friendly. I've got a lot of non-techy friends or family, that use Ecosia or something. They also did it on their own, I didn't even encourage them to do it.

With things like Linux it's a bit harder. But if they don't rely on any specialized software, they are usually fine with me offering to upgrade their Laptops so Linux. I installed Linux Mint on my Mom's Laptop and she can use it as well as Windows. She never complained about it.

I think this might make for a stronger argument with "Linux" instead of "Google".

I don't understand this, if it's installable on gentoo using the default method of building from source then it has to be open source, right?

Or have I misunderstood gentoo? I considered trying it once, but didn't fancy compiling everything on a potato.

there's a lot of people that hopped on the Linux train in the past few years. which is great, truly. but many of them don't understand where it came from or what it was originally designed to solve. particularly on lemmy, people are pretty up in arms about their opinions of Linux all the time, so I would bet whichever comm was doing that is mainly the new heads. again, love that it's getting mainstream recognition but I wish the combative attitude was at least tabled until they actually understand it.

the recent debate of systemd in here kind of drove home that a lot of people just parrot points without having their own thought out opinions.

My experience with the Linux communities here has been the opposite. Very welcoming, and very helpful.

Wait, who was making that claim?

Thank you Richard, however:

1. Not all Linux distributions use GNU.
2. GNU coreutils aren't the only or even most important component of a modern distro. systemd is.

No. People who are 30+ maybe. But there are tons of people in GenZ (my generation) and Alpha that don't even know what folders or symlinks Edit: shortcuts are. And Firefox is a nieche browser since 10 years or so.

Hah no they don't. My partner doesn't even really know what a browser is, or where the distinction between phone/pc and 'the internet' lies. Sure she might have heard of the word 'firefox' but no way she can explain what it is or does.

Everyone uses VLC still right? ... Right?

"Why does your google look like that"

The vast majority of people I work with in my organization have absolutely no idea what Firefox is or that there are other browsers. You, me, and everyone here is living in a bubble.

I wouldn't be surprised if gen alpha hasn't heard if it because schools primarily use Chromebooks and the only browser is chrome

The Kim Jong side eye is great, almost like the Fry futurama meme.

But those notepads. Always with the notepads.

Chrome based browsers are riddled with privacy invasive features, data collection etc...

Also, ad blocking in chrome is crippled purposely because Google wants ad revenue.

Firefox has less of these anti features, and there are plenty of Firefox derivatives that have none of them.

Do you happen to live in Spain during a football game

Looks like there's an outage at the moment

You're not alone, I can't either. Not sure if I've ever been able to.

The Fast-MBysoon Project

Fast-MBysoon (Microkernel-Based YAML Synchronisation Object Notifier) is an ultra-low-latency middleware layer designed for distributed industrial robotics.

In high-stakes environments—like automated assembly lines or autonomous warehouse swarms—different hardware modules need to share state updates without the overhead of a bloated OS. Fast-MBysoon treats system configurations and sensor states as YAML-defined Synchronization Objects.

By operating on a microkernel architecture, it ensures that when one robot arm's "Object" (e.g., current_velocity) changes, every other node in the cluster is notified with nanosecond precision, bypassing traditional networking stacks.

---

Core Architecture

The system relies on a "Pub-Sub" model where the microkernel acts as a high-speed traffic controller for YAML-serialized state blobs.

1. The Registry: A lightweight table in kernel space tracking which nodes care about which YAML keys.
2. The Sync-Object: A versioned memory segment representing the "Source of Truth."
3. The Notifier: A hardware-interrupt-driven signal that wakes up subscriber threads the moment a bit flips.

---

Abstract Pseudo-Code

The following represents the high-level logic of the Fast-MBysoon kernel loop and a typical client interaction.

1. The Microkernel Dispatcher

This runs in the privileged ring of the microkernel, managing memory gates.

# Kernel Space: The "MBysoon" Heartbeat
function KERNEL_SYNC_DISPATCHER():
    while true:
        # Wait for a hardware interrupt from a Node
        event = WAIT_FOR_INTERRUPT()
        
        if event.type == "OBJECT_UPDATE":
            # Identify the YAML object being changed
            target_obj = Registry.lookup(event.object_id)
            
            # Validate the new YAML schema against the blueprint
            if VALIDATE_SCHEMA(event.payload, target_obj.blueprint):
                # Atomic swap of the object in shared memory
                ATOMIC_COMMIT(target_obj.memory_address, event.payload)
                
                # Notify all subscribers via direct kernel signal
                for subscriber in target_obj.subscribers:
                    SIGNAL_THREAD(subscriber.thread_id, "STATE_CHANGED")

2. The Client-Side Implementation

This is how a robotic "Gripper" module would interact with the "Arm" module's state.

# User Space: Robotic Gripper Node
import MBysoon_Client as mb

def ON_ARM_MOVE(new_state_yaml):
    # Logic to adjust gripper pressure based on arm speed
    speed = new_state_yaml['velocity']['vector_sum']
    if speed > 5.0:
        ACTUATE_GRIP_STRENGTH("HIGH")

# Initialization
# 1. Map the remote "Arm_Status" object to local memory
arm_status = mb.subscribe("industrial_cluster/arm_01/status.yaml")

# 2. Assign the callback for notifications
arm_status.on_update(ON_ARM_MOVE)

# 3. Execution loop
while system_running:
    # The MBysoon kernel handles the heavy lifting
    # This thread sleeps until the Notifier wakes it up
    mb.AWAIT_NOTIFICATION()

---

Why "YAML"?

While binary formats are faster, Fast-MBysoon uses a pre-compiled "YAML-Binary" hybrid. This allows engineers to write human-readable configurations for complex robotic behaviors that are "baked" into the microkernel at boot time, combining developer-friendly syntax with machine-speed execution.

Are we talking about that original one? Where he tried Pop!_OS and tried to install Steam and the package installer gave a big message that something wasn't right, so he chuckled, TL;DR'd and hit "yes anyway" and was shocked he borked his install?

That LTT?

I'm never gonna fault somebody for unfamiliarity, but we should absolutely fault people, especially ones with any tech experience, for not reading helpful messages right in front of them.

To be fair, LTT has had a very long history of shitting on Linux, while giving Windows a free pass.

lokening???

The vast majority of people don't give a shit don't care and still would prefer to use it. Hell myself as a technical person in the IT field for 20 plus years would much rather use Google than most of the alternatives out there within the environment that I have to use to do the job I do.

Don't even get me started on how many people don't even know what an address bar is. They Google everything.

It states that experts will overestimate the lay-person's knowledge.

That's exactly what the meme is saying.

It states that experts will overestimate the lay-person's knowledge.

Is this not what the comic is saying?