linuxmemes

Oh let's be honest, elitism has always been baked into linux a bit. Remember the old joke about how to get help on a linux comm? Ask and get told to RTFM even if you detail a complex issue that demonstrates you have in fact read tf m. Say "linux sucks because you can't do X or Y like you can in windows" and they fall over themselves.....

But yeah, the new batch of users are just...you want to gently grab them by the face and say "you're not fucking nero hacking the matrix because a command line interface doesn't make you shit your pants any more my dude. Stop acting like it."

As soon as a kind of Tech starts getting fanboys, you start getting ignorant bollocks about it, not just from the fanboys but also from the kind of people that, just as emotionally, set themselves against the fanboys not because of any understanding of the weaknesses of the Tech itself but purelly as a psychological need to set themselves against the fanboys.

Linux used to have a huge barrier to entry - for example, you used to literally have to understand how CRTs worked in order to configure X and get it running - which kept the fanboyism down and the few whose like for it went all the way into fanboyisms were at least technically savvy so mainly understood what they were talking about, but nowadays the "quality" of fanboys is closer to the level of game, celebrity or or political fanboys - people highly emotionally engaged that don't have any in depth understanding and are only "experts" on the highly visible superficial stuff.

Anyways, all this to say that fanboyism, whilst being a bad way to relate to Tech (IMHO, and the same for people who set themselves against fanboys as just as mindless contrarians), does indicate to me that Linux is definitelly becoming established as mainstream rather than the OS for mainly server side experts and hobbyists that it was for decades.

Yeah, like 'google it' instead of 'look it up'

YEP.

I used to work in a library computer lab. It was soul sucking, how many people older than millennials couldn't friggin handle a basic computer. I heard the words "I clicked the 'E' for 'internet'." multiple times A DAY. (Thanks, 1990's Microsoft and No Child Left Behind.)

"CaNt I jUsT uSe My PhOnE?" (Which would be a million more steps on my part...thanks, 2006 apple, and defunding schools.)

The biggest ragebait for me was "I dOn'T kNoW cOmPuTeRs, I'm oLd ScHoOL."

I'm like "PCs have been increasingly commonplace since the mid-1980's. It's currently the 2020's. You're like 56. HOW 'OLD' IS YOUR SCHOOL?! Because somehow you drove a car here!"

I imagine a certain weird kind of "privilege", to have been able to somehow dodge computers and learning this entire time, when they were so often found in homes, schools, and workplaces.

Like it takes significant effort to somehow avoid even an accidental education. HOW?!

It's...infuriating. These rubes can gleefully scroll tiktok and dump all their personal lives into Facebook, but freak out about sending an email.

Many of them were even around to try the Internet during Eternal September and AOL, and now they've exchanged the squishy fat in their skulls for convenient slop.

I'd bend over backwards to patiently teach, but few cared to learn.

Their collective, willful ignorance is why we're fighting a constant uphill battle against attempts to turn the entirety of computing into nothing but a commercialized authoritarian hellscape.

I left that job because if I heard one more "Kids are born so smart with these computers because my (grand)kids can watch their cocomelons all by themselves." I would've snapped and been booked for assault.

Lol /rant

...clearly this is a button for me...I have sought help in the past...

Learnt helplessness has become a real thing around the world.

I know a lot of people who could normally wrap their head around basic computing and troubleshooting in the 2000s, who now go into a near panic attack if the apps on their iPhone suddenly look different...