alt text
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
I used to think everyone at least knew VLC media player or Firefox, but nope.
Now I first ask which field, if they’re CS they know linux, if art, they know blender, if geosciences they know QGIS, anything else is hard
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.”
ArcGIS is the proprietary industry standard, but QGIS is catching up. I personally don’t like Arc and have only used it when I was in industry. Even in academia colleges pay for ArcGIS but I just use QGIS.
You can also customize QGIS easily and there’re a lot of community plugins. And works well with other open source tools or CLI tools.
Main thing that makes Arc popular in industry is the liability. They can claim they used the best available industry standard software, so the errors are not their fault, and deflect it to the software company. While with open-source alternatives they might be held liable. It’s not a problem if the open source is the standard. But that only happens when they were there first, hard to do it otherwise.
QGIS sounds really cool! I’ll definitely bring that up so she can practice that Environmental Sciences degree. :)
Insane about the liability angle. I had never considered that! Sounds like far too serious a business for my tastes.
I’m glad there’s a lot of open source libraries, and Linux is heavily employed in scientific and academic circles, at least. :)
Perhaps theyd be less annoyed it you pronounced it “arse-jizz”?
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
Psh, I’ve been on Linux for almost 20 years and I’m a guitarist lol
I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions. linux users come from various backgrounds, if someone told me they use Linux I don’t assume they’re from CS. I’m not either. But given they’re not from CS, the chances they’ve even heard of it is very low.
It’s just a sad but real fact that when you go out into the real world outside of your online communities with similar interests, people don’t know Linux or open source.