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My parents know one and it's windows. One time my dad messaged me at work to ask if his laptop had windows xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11, so he doesn't even know the version differences :p
My mom may also say "samsung" as an operating system if you prod enough, but she also knows their laptop has windows 11, so she knows more than my dad
So that's what the average non-tech person thinks about OSes
Yeah. A typical non-tech person is just as likely to say their PC is running on Microsoft or Google. Maybe they'll say Edge if they are really knowledgeable.
I worked tech support in a call center, a thousand years ago.
Telling people to click on the "big blue E" was used nearly every call. Not much has changed.
I constantly remind myself of the George Carlin(I think) quote:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.”
Also important to remember Douglas Adams (when underestimating stupid people):
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Have gotten to post that one twice this week!
While I don't disagree with this in principal, it's important to distinguish between stupidity and ignorance. Most people don't know about OSes because they've never needed to learn more than how to do basic tasks, and so are ignorant of how they work, what alternatives are out there, and why someone might choose one. This is very different to being incapable of those technicalities if shown a good reason to do so.
I always think about the effort to create a bear proof trash can in Yosemite that gave us the phrase “there is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist”.
gotta add the babbage classic :
On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
those are modern techbros now
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Am in tech. Surrounded by tech people. Front devs, back devs, data engineers, data scientists and analysts, IT techs...
They know windows. They know macOS as an "easier alternative for normies". Some of them even prefer it because it's "easy". A few of them even know there's a terminal somewhere, but wouldn't git commit from the command line even if their life depended on it.
A lot of them have heard of Linux, in a distant and nebulous way. Most of them still believe that Linux is confined to the server space or a weird dev environment inside WSL because you're developing for servers, that you can't daily drive Linux as a desktop, or that you can't game on Linux. None of them would consider switching even if they spend their day complaining about how shitty windows is.
This is true for about 95% of the tech people I interact with btw. Big tech psyop is real.
I wouldn't take a developer who can't write git commit from command line seriously
One of my developer interns only ever uses the visual Git plugin in IntelliJ. It seems to work for him, but I can't figure it out at all for the life of me; something about the visuals made it so difficult for me to parse. I'll stick to my terminal, thanks.
If you put Linux Mint on the average persons PC and set it up with the same desktop icons as their windows pc they wouldn't know it wasn't windows.
Just show them where the web browser is and done!
No shit I did this for my partners grandparent. All they needed was the browser to do shit like Facebook and paying bills. Slapped Linux Mint on their near dinosaur laptop with a Windows theme and they were none the wiser.
My dad has been running Linux Mint for almost 10 years now and he doesn't know that LibreOffice isn't "Linux."
Computer scientists don't understand this. This is systems.
Seriously, I have met computer scientists who admit they don't know how the computer works, but simply is processional math.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking.
Computer science doesn't mean you know how to a use a computer; astronomers and microbiologists don't know much about telescopes and microscopes.
And CS students have the dumbest "smart" questions.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking
I mean, computer science is basically the mathematics of computation. It's not like the people working on knot theory or topology are great with 3d art or knitting
Most cs degrees I've seen, including my own include an operating systems course.
"How a computer works"
It really depends what you mean, and at what depth; theres a tone of stuff in there. Even then I think your mostly wrong, you just notice/remember the ones who are inept at using their computer.
If you mean run program x on os y, well then sure
I swear I saw a comment around here that said "the average user does not want bloatware like systemd on their computer" and I just kind of wonder if we are all living on the same planet sometimes.
"The average person probably only knows systemd and one or two generations of sysvinit" "and upstart of course" "of course"
I started building pcs to replace cable boxes for people. The realization I had is that most people's understanding of technology starts and ends with their phone.
One of the two is bound to be Hannah Montana linux
I jokingly threatened to install Hannah Montanna Linux on my wife's windows gaming rig, and she said she wouldn't be mad.
If only that version wasn't deprecated.
I believe it was recently revived.
Oh shit, hell yeah
I started a class this year, a forensics class related to computers. The intro prompt is interesting, what computer do you have, windows or mac?
The fuck is BSD?
sincerely: a non-technical mint user
B (Berkeley), S (Software), D (Distribution).
A Unix based OS, developed at Berkeley.
Technically yes, but there's a lot more to it lol
It's a bit like if you separated two twins and raised them in isolation to study nature vs nurture
So, there are a couple of things. Here is where I push up my glasses and say "well--ahem--"
First, true, BSD is not itself Unix. That specific OS (which began with the PDP-7 Operating System in the late 1960s) really only existed until the late 80s or early 90s, when Bell Labs stopped working on it.
However, it is literally Unix-based. The first version of BSD was forked (as we'd call it today) from the Research Unix source code at UC Berkeley. Since then, the various BSD derivatives and distros have all iterated upon or forked from that initial Unix code. I don't think any are officially registered as SUS systems (but there are only a handful that are), which means that a pedant would say that BSD is technically "Unix-like."
But it is based on Unix, it's a part of the Unix family, just like Windows 11 is part of the NT family. MacOS is also part of the Unix family (I think it might be or used to have been SUS-registered, actually). Linux isn't, and I think I remember hearing that Torvalds didn't even use the Research Unix source code to write the Linux kernel originally, but it does follow a lot of the SUS spec and so is definitely Unix-like.
A separate family of operating systems. It's a direct decendant of the old UNIX. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are the most common distributions.
It shares a lot of the same userspace tools as Linux (the GNUserspace, if you will), so if you're used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance. However, the underlying mechanisms can feel a bit strange at first once you try it out.
I used FreeBSD as my daily driver back in the day, but now I'm also on Mint, mostly because I used linux more at work.
I've been meaning to check out BSD these days to see how far it's come since I last used it 20ish years ago, I just haven't gotten around to it.
I also remember hearing someone say that there are two things from Berkley that messes with your head: BSD and LSD.
Basically Macos
What the fuck did you just fucking say to me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at Berkeley, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on GNU, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in al-gore-rhythm warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire FOSS ecosystem. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo
It's weird to think about it and notice that's basically true.
MacOS is closed-sourced Darwin, which is itself a descendant of BSD.
Omg, license laundering goes brrr.
I would be surprised if the average person knows even one operating system, including the ones they use
i am pretty sure quite few people would not notice at all if you changed their windows for kde, as long as the same icons were on the same place on desktop.
That is true, don't even need to change icons.
Years ago when I lived with my parents I had my mother's desktop setup with a dual boot testing things in KDE 3. Went to get a snack and came back to my mother sitting there playing kmahjongg.
She spent two hours playing kmahjongg and kpatience before she yelled wanting to know where her microsoft picture-it was. Never even noticed she wasn't in Windows.
The average person has tried four or five different operating systems.
What about Solaris? Irix? OS/2? BeOS? Certainly people have at least a passing awareness of the most popular OSes. I mean, I wouldn't expect VMS to be on their list, but...
i used https://marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-generator/ to remake it:
(posted here in !linuxmemes@lemmy.world)