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
Damn, I didn’t know people couldn’t financially afford installing Linux.
“Open source is free if you don’t value your time.” (forgot who that quote is from)
Sometimes the time investment is small, but especially for complex software, the friction of switching from one imperfect (proprietary) software to another imperfect (open) software makes it not really make much sense unless the issue is severe (house is half destroyed).
This is basically what he was saying. Open source tends to be a much less plug-and-play out-of-the-box experience, and usually requires at least some IT know-how for it to not be an infuriating experience. A lot of FOSS advocates compensate for that by kind of being that over explaining bro meme and get kinda pushy about getting people over the technical barriers because they want FOSS to be widely adopted and be a real alternative, and for good reasons. But most people don’t have the time or patience to stumblefuck their way through IT issues, they just want the shit to work.
It’s a fair criticism, accessibility is a big problem in FOSS. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.
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Well, it’s mastodon. You’ve got a little over 400 characters to say what you’re going to say in the most shocking, attention-getting way possible. Yes, it’s not a perfect analogy, but no metaphor is perfect or else it wouldn’t really be a metaphor, would it?
Anyway, it’s a time and convenience cost that becomes extremely significant as your IT proficiency decreases, and you’ve got another think coming if you think those costs don’t matter to people.
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Okay, I guess. This isn’t really a hill I’m prepared to die on. The point is that it’s still a cost that’s real to the user, even if it’s not a direct financial one.
“Help, I can’t afford rent!” -> “Buy a house, stupid.”
“Help, this software is buggy and unintuitive!” -> “Try using buggier and more unintuitive software, stupid.”
Seems like a solid metaphor to me.
Kind of off topic, but you can change how many characters your mastodon instance allows. Mine allows 1337 (for some reason) and I know many have it unlimited. I don’t know about TC’s instance.
Probably because it’s leet.
Good to know, thanks!
For the last decade my job has consisted of helping IT administrators manage open source software. Even if they’ve got all the certifications in the world they get stuck. A lot. Like, so much that I’m amazed the Internet works at all.
And then the get angry, like the computer is going to respond to their anger. They stop reading error messages. They forget to look at logs. They can’t just stop and read and think.
The computer doesn’t care that you’re angry. It’s a Turing machine, and it can do anything a Turing machine can do provided it’s told to do the correct things.
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I don’t think it is so much claiming that open source doesn’t value time, but the opposite: (switching to) open source isn’t free, because it has a time cost that needs to be discussed. Technically the arguments holds for switching between any software, open or otherwise, but when your pitching to someone who already is using proprietary software that works well enough, the cost of staying can be much lower.
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but if for whatever reason your OS got borked and it took you more than a certain amount of hours to recover, you’d switch to Windows.
do you also count the time spent on arcane windows issues?
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It only took me…
-checks notes-
5 hours to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11.
The installer is trash. Literally requires everything but the OS disk attached to the machine.
do you do this regularly? and if so, why?
don’t get me wrong, plenty of things need troubleshooting in Windows, too. but a one time upgrade taking a bit too long isn’t exactly a persistent problem.
No, but it was still a similar experience to what others had in Linux in this post. Honestly never had an update be a problem on a Linux machine. It also wasn’t it taking long. It provides a generic error that could mean 100 different things and I had to troubleshoot to find which one it was.
Also, last time I tried installing Windows 10, I gave up trying to make the graphics drivers work properly. IDK what the hell the issue was, but Ubuntu is a lot more plug-and-play for me than that - the proper graphics drivers were included out of the box!
I’ve spent a lot of time on both windows and a bit less on Linux and I can firmly say I’ve spent far more time troubleshooting on Linux than on Windows.
Windows tends to give me bullshit like audio crackling or nvidia’s stupid fucking software. With Linux the issues tend to be far more drastic, such as UI problems with every window, or misconfigured packages fucking with the entire OS, or an entire operating system just not functioning correctly with my hardware.
A lot of this I could fix by not being such an idiot by how I use Linux, but in my defense at the time I didn’t know best practices for using Linux as a general user, and a lot of internet guides sure didn’t explain the dangers of what I was doing. Meanwhile, I’ve never fucked myself enough to need to reinstall windows by reading online guides.
I’m glad I stuck with Linux long enough that it’s what I always put on my laptops no matter what, but man I would not want to put that on others, especially people with working lives.
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I’d like you to meet windows 11. Windows 11 bricked my Alienware computer for two weeks until I said fuck it and installed Linux. They pushed an update that triggered the Bitlocker secure boot policy, which is annoying but not a problem. Except that the Bitlocker recovery key page on Microsoft’s website has been down for over a month. There’s other users like me who’ve had their machines bricked because Microsoft fucked up a webpage and can’t be assed to do a git revert. It took me hours of navigating Microsoft’s intentionally terrible support pages to figure out how to talk to a person (over IM, phone support is not a thing anymore), another 40 minutes to get a support tech on the chat, and then they told me that basically my options are to wait or wipe the drives and re-install windows 11.
I didn’t want to wipe my drives, I liked my drives, but I’m not going to just let a machine sit there and be bricked for three months until Microsoft can be assed to un-brick it. So, I wiped the drives and installed mint. I can’t play all the games I used to (I can access probably 75% of my game library) but the performance is WAY better, like, obviously and shockingly better. Turns out that Bitlocker throttles your SSD performance significantly, and it also helps when your OS isn’t trying to both run a game and send your delicious, delicious data to ad servers or whatever.
And windows wants even more live service dependencies with 12? Fuck that. I’ve been with them since '95, but I won’t follow them there. 11’s live service dependencies have been a disaster, and I can’t see myself getting excited about even more of that.
Time is money after all.
You can ask a CEO to waste hours upon hours learning Linux, or they could install Windows and make bank using the hours saved.
Better comparison would’ve been something like “Annoyed with your landlord? Go build a cabin in the woods!”. Like, that’s straight-up appealing to some people, but it’s also not just something anyone and everyone can do.
Even then that’s not that accurate, more like move to a different place. It’s inconvenient and might not have all the same things you wanted/liked from your old place but you can actually change things in the new place if you really want to
More like moving to France. For me it wouldn’t be an issue. My french isn’t bad and I learn languages quickly.
I assume that’s not true of everyone, just like everyone isn’t great at PC stuff.
Then you find out that while the new place doesn’t have the problems the old place had, it has a whole new set of problems.
Sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
It is the same reason why tons of airports still run on Windows XP.
They already have documented every single issue that could even happen and their solution. Having a new OS would mean new problems that won’t be solved in less than 5 minutes. Which at an airport could mean lives are at stake.
Guy wanted to vent about smart thermostats, explicitly said he doesn’t need advice and got bajillion responses with advice, mostly from FOSS folks who couldn’t contain themselves. I’d be annoyed too.
When I say “don’t think of a panda”, what do you think of? Pretty much the same thing with saying “don’t recommend me FOSS options” lol
No. Thinking about the panda is involuntary in that scenario. Typing up and submitting an explicitly unwanted response is not involuntary. It’s a thing a person chooses to do expressly against the wishes of the person making the request.
Ya, implying recommending FOSS options is an involuntary action was tongue-in-cheek.
I’m on lemmy. Obviously, I think about Marxism-Leninism.
Not Motorhead?
https://charlies-names.com/en/lemmy/
nickname of Motörhead’s singer Ian Fraser Kilmister. The name originated from his often said sentence “can you lem’me five?” or “lemme a fiver?”
That’s the biggest annoyance with mastodon
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It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)
Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.
The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.
Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.
But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.
Oh yeah I think that generally mastodon is far nicer
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It was for me too because I wasn’t following anyone. As soon as I started following people that had strong opinions about technology and politics, well…
Translation:“I refuse to try the thing that people tell me might make my life better. I prefer to rant and complain to random strangers on a public forum rather than accepting that a solution to my problem may exist”
It’s funny, this is not at all his stance when it comes to hardware and appliances. It doesn’t even sound like something he’d say.
The whole point is that a bunch of people don’t have the technical skills to figure out FOSS. Sure, sometimes the ux is just as good as the main competitor, but in my experience, usually it isnt and has a decent learning curve
I’d be more sympathetic to that mindset if it was anyone other than TC saying this. He’s a smart dude and I have every confidence he could figure out how to use a new piece of software.
I think he’s talking in general. But who knows.
He is, very obviously.
Some of his recent rants have been about technology that is actively unfriendly to people who are not good with technology. That doesn’t mean he cannot figure it out, but it means his parents can’t.
Inevitably people show up to suggest a giant convoluted solution based on the power of open source. Menu poorly worded on the ecobee? They should be using home assistant anyway!
… could.
Or he (and anyone else) could go and do one of 20000 other potentially way more interesting things with their life.
Imagine that?
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ui/ux sucks because it is hard to onboard designer into FOSS logic.
True with QA, technical writers and PMs too
It’s an interesting take from a tech YouTuber to say they are not good with tech
He’s noticed an issue that people who are into tech always push complicated things onto non techies. I don’t see how that is contradictory or weird…
This was a case of people coming to him
He is the other kind of thech tho. He isn’t the programmer kind of tech.
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.
I follow him on Mastodon, and I think many regular users misunderstand his specific problems. They’re unique due to his huge number of followers, and I think that if we want Mastodon to grow, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to include more tools for folks with large followings.
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That’s fine, but we need to just admit that and stop trying to get the big users to stay by sheer force of will. Either give them the tools they need or accept that Mastodon isn’t for them and that they’ll go elsewhere. You can’t have it both ways.
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Clearly they do care though. Look at all of the earnest replies to his posts! If folks didn’t care, they would say as much.
When I say to my sister “I will literally buy the house for you, help you move in, and give you my phone number you can call any time you need any help with it” and she comes back with “I’d rather sit here and complain about my landlord” I think I have a right to get angry
you have to admit this is one hell of an edge case. the vast majority don’t have your sister’s ‘problem’
I think the majority of us also don’t want to play tech support.
You haven’t seen the FOSS community then
Also you will have to play tech support no matter what if you set them up
