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
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.
That’s the biggest annoyance with mastodon
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.
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.
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… could.
Or he (and anyone else) could go and do one of 20000 other potentially way more interesting things with their life.
Imagine that?
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!
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.
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…
He is the other kind of thech tho. He isn’t the programmer kind of tech.
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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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.
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.
Are houses free now?
Exactly! I actually talked back and forth with him a bit and eventually said that “complaining about a missing FOSS feature is like complaining to the volunteer ladeler at a soup kitchen about the lack of a gluten-free option. It’s just not the path to getting the change you want.”
In the end he seemed to get what I was saying, but was still irritated. I’ve been really learning lately how hard it is for some people not to see themselves as customers in FOSS land.
I’ve been really learning lately how hard it is for some people not to see themselves as customers in FOSS land.
It perplexes me, because when people get free stuff that isn’t FOSS, they have no place to complain. Their only option is to pay for the software, but most don’t. As soon as they see a place they can complain, they go twitter on the place.
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
Yeah, and that is their opinion, which is as valid as yours.
They are the ones who will have to use the software day in and out, they should be the ones to decide which software they use.
okay but you still don’t get to act like i’m saying “just buy a house!”
If I had you as a sibling I would use a lot more foss stuff then lol.
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.
I don’t like helping non-tech people because they don’t want to learn. They just want it fixed. I understand the mindset and I’m that same way on other things. But I don’t want to be their “tech guy”.
I do like helping in the FOSS community though because people generally do want to learn.
You haven’t seen the FOSS community then
Also you will have to play tech support no matter what if you set them up
Or you will need help and ask questions and people will assume you are “lazy asking” and be toxic just because you are a beginner and don’t know stuff. Recently I’ve lost count on how many projects I joined some kind of communication space like Discord and left as soon as I saw how awful people can be when they want to gatekeep
the sword is double edged, the ones you neglect will come to you when it gets bad.
Which is why me and people like me don’t care much what our relatives use :D
“This program is really expensive and I keep having to buy a new computer every two years because it gets so slow.”
You’re being fucked with, when there are alternatives out there.
But that is none of my business.
Alternatives aren’t always a solution.
You can’t know until you try it.
Professionals are trained on already available answers, often target marketed, which moves forward the penetration of such answers into broad society.
This does not mean they are good or bad, just popular.
Any alternative solution will always be compared to the more popular, even if better.
Are you trying to gather a lynch mob here? I think posts like these are quite bad taste. Most wont have a good understanding of the situation.
Does this really fit this community?
Is there a community where a take like this would be considered and welcome? Asking because I would like to follow that community…
I agree. As inaccurate as Technology Connection’s statement is, this post here is kind of…distasteful.
I think it’s a discussion worth having, since it’s clearly a recurring problem.
with all do respect, what discussion can we have here other than dunking on technology connections with an out of context post that misses the second post that clarifies what hes actually saying?
@morrowind funny to find this here when I wrote my reply just a while ago:
“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.”
Maybe if you’re suggesting them to install Linux From Scratch, then yes, it is.
If you’re suggesting them them to install any of the many very simple (and very usable OOTB) distros like Fedora, then it’s not.
In that case it’s like the house is free, already built and furnitured, and right next to their own; but they have to move their personal belongings from one house to the other and learn a different room layout.
Sure, they still have the right to complain about how their landlord treats them like crap. But they sound pretty damn stupid if they do so while having an available free house right next door, and refusing to move because they don’t want to learn a new room layout.
How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?
I’m talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, …
- That house isn’t furnished.
And don’t forget, plenty of popular software isn’t even compatible. Meaning you got to use alternative software that doesn’t always do what you want it to do.
- So buy a new couch, cause that one isn’t getting in.
How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?
I’m talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, …
Is proprietary software any easier than that though? Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?
Whereas with Fedora my experience is more or less install it and forget it.
The “it’s easier” argument for proprietary software I think died at least 15 years ago.
Choice of applications is a different argument.
Is proprietary software any easier than that though?
Yes, take nvidia drivers for example, on windows I just download the installer and run it and done.
Last time I tried to move to Linux desktop (attempted Fedora and then EndeavourOS) about a year ago, none of that worked properly. Installing drivers was not in any way straightforward, needing CLI commands and google, where every guide I found seemed to have a different method used to install them, I kept getting outdated ones, and I had no idea what I was doing.
At the end of all that I still didn’t have HW acceleration in my browsers, my desktop had screen tearing, gsync didn’t work properly in windowed apps, the GPU wouldn’t downclock fully at idle like it’s supposed to, I couldn’t figure out how to get shadowplay working, and so on.
And yes I do know this is technically mostly nvidia’s fault for not having as good quality of drivers on linux. But as an end user all I care about is that my stuff works properly without googling things, needing the CLI, and spending a lot of time on it.
Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?
Definitely not, I don’t really spend much time at all. I haven’t experienced forced updates, my apps just update through winget manually when I want to. There are a few extra apps I don’t need on windows but those take a minute to remove, I can’t say I’ve ever experienced an app being installed without my permission other than edge I guess, but that replaces IE for embedded browser stuff so it’s kind of needed.
Most of my ‘admin’ time is spent on the opensource apps I use, generally on my self hosted stuff. But also just on basic things like backup software, Veeam is my primary backup which is basically a 1 minute set up with a few clicks through the GUI, but I’ve been trying out Restic too which requires writing my own scripts to handle backups, more scripts to handle pruning and such, manually installing them as services so they run properly, and writing my own notification system on top of that just to get an email if something goes wrong.
Opensource is great, but it’s usually extremely time intensive to get the same results, with lots of documentation, google, and just wasted time trying to figure out the basics.
Admittedly I do have the bias of experience which could blind me to the difficulties, when I phrased my first two sentences as questions they were genuine questions. Between work and personal life I must’ve installed Linux in some form at least 200 times over the last 20 years, so I’m not most users.
I’ve also not used Windows in many years, the last I think was when I had to use Windows 7 for work about 10 years ago and I found it extremely difficult to get it to do what I want. If it’s improved then it’s improved.
On the other hand a novice user can ask somebody to install Linux for them, what about that? That’s what my non-techy parents have done, and it’s easier for them to use Linux (they say so) and easier for me to provide technical support for them.
Also yes, avoid Nvidia.
Yes we do get sort of blind to what the average non-tech person wants out of their computer, I certainly have plenty of Linux experience on servers, but that just doesn’t seem to translate across to being able to easily troubleshoot desktop Linux issues. I think because a server is a ‘set up once’ type thing, whereas running linux on my desktop feels like a constant battle with installing programs, and driver updates or new versions of a game breaking things.
IMO windows has vastly improved since W7. I can’t even remember the last time I had to troubleshoot a game or program not working properly. I have W11 on 3 PCs and it’s been extremely stable, almost every program other than games is installed via the winget package manager which also handles updates, and it doesn’t get that ‘windows slows down over time’ feeling that used to happen on 7, vista, etc… Obviously there’s some bloat to remove when you first install it, and a few annoying settings to change, but that’s not that big of a deal to me and I spend just as much time on a fresh linux install getting things how I want them.
As far as the GPU choice, right now nvidia just makes a better GPU IMO, with their DLSS and frame-gen that AMD so far can’t compete with. Shadowplay also works a lot more reliably than ReLive in my experience. I briefly had an RX 6700XT for a few weeks before returning it due to driver/software issues.
I spend enough time fixing IT things at work and on my selfhosted server stuff, I just want to get home, hit the power button on my PC and play some games or work on some code for a project without anything getting in the way.
How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?
“Every”
With 0 experience with linux i installed nobara without any problems. I didnt need to install anything else(edit: excluding the software you can install in the “welcome” app), to change something in the settings etc
The only “hard” thing i had to do was to disable secure boot in the BIOS
I think you are talking about the situation that might be true 15 years ago, vut right now you’ll be hardpressed to find anything that doesn’t work out of the box on any modern distribution. I don’t know what plugins and dependancies don’t work on your machine, but I assure you it’s not a universal experience, far from it.
Also, most of the software that you use on Linux is free, so you don’t “buy” new couch if your old is built specifically for your old house, you learn to sit on any of the new ones that you can get for free at any momentDraugerOS wouldnt even boot from the thumb drive for me. Garuda sort of worked, the live boot was damn near perfect, from a stability and basic performance perspective, but after a basic install there were some annoying artifacts like a block behind the cursor on some windows, steams store page would flash rapidly and performance was trash in any game even on low settings. A Logitech mouse scroll wheel was hit or miss working. I mean like you spin the wheel and while the wheel was free spinning the browser would start and stop responding to it. 8 hours of messing with kernels, drivers, and settings it I threw in the towel. Not worth the effort to just get it to run normally let alone
Arch was similarly poor performance. Mint was also poor performance. Im not a fan of the PopOS style, but it actually ran great on my machine so, I’ll take it.
Point being, I tried 4 different distros before finding one that worked mostly well out of box.
Edit: wrong name for draugeros
Where the fuck have you found whatever weird esoteric distribs you are talking about, and why on earth did you went with those? Depending on the answer to the question, I kind of understand how you managed to make Arch “perform poorly” whatever that means in that regard, you need to have at least basic understanding to use Arch (or treat it as an opportunity to learn).
But you don’t start your experiments with something from third page of Google, at that point you’re an alpha tester.Google best gaming Linux distros. DraugerOS, Garuda, and popos are all prominent distros focused on gaming.
DraugerOS is Ubuntu LTS based.
Mint, not gaming focused, has been around for ages and is Ubuntu based. I’ve used it previously on older hardware with no issue. Just apparently doesn’t like newer hardware.
Garuda is arch based, probably why it was such a pain.
Popos is Ubuntu based as well.
I’ve also tried KDE plasma, ubuntu based, and man was that slow as hell. Works great on some hardware not on the hardware I tried.
I’ve installed Ubuntu in the past and had WiFi driver issues.
You mentioned any modern distros should work out of the box. The only one listed that mostly worked out of the box with semi reasonable performance was popos.
if someone is looking to install a distros to play games, theyll probably google “Linux for gaming” install one of the prominent distros listed above geared toward gaming then bang their head against the wall and quit.
We may understand arch is a full time job, but when Joe from sales builds a new gaming rig and took someone’s advice to install Linux and save money he doesn’t know all Linux distros are not created equally. Maybe he gets garuda or draugeros and bangs his head against the wall then goes back to windows.
There are a million different distros and yes some of the major ones work fine, but not always and if you run into issues it can be exponentially harder to fix the issue especially if you have no IT experience. Making it even worse is toxicity in forums or other support places where people treat you like you should know better because they have of knowledge of Linux and forget that we all have different levels of experience, many people have no experience.
It’s somewhere in between, you’re not building your own software, but oss software does usually tend to need more work. It’s like telling someone with a shitty landlord to move to a new house which they get to own, but it has no paint, or lighting, or flooring and they have to move their furniture and learn a different layout
And If it doesn’t require more work, it requires different work. The beast you know is easier and more comfortable to understand than the beast you don’t know, even if it would be more beneficial to learn to deal with the newcomer.
Well. And maybe the new house doesn’t support their bed.
i mean yeah but they can just dual boot to metaphorically keep the old house too
Or you can just keep your old house where everything works, and the only annoying thing is the landlord.
Just gotta figure out if you’re ok with your landlord reading your diary.
Most people are completely fine with it.
It really isn’t though.
A day or two or even a week to get the hang of something isn’t a 40-year mortgage
Except it is actually the inverse. FOSS is usually free to access and fork. Whereas commercial walled gardens cost you thousands.
The cost of something isn’t always in the form of money. In many cases with Foss there are comprises in either simplicity, stability, documentation, or compatabiliry.
For instance I can boot my machine into a live garuda instance and it runs great, but as soon as I install it, it runs like trash. I spend something like 3 hours fiddling trying to get it going then wipe and try to install smaugos and it wont even boot. I install debian and it works okay but sluggish. Popos works fine. 2 days of fiddling around and I find something that works. Windows may cost more than just money, but it worked out of the box and I didn’t have to fiddle or try a bunch of different distros. We can go down that rabbit hole, but let’s look at other things.
Foss often has volunteer support that can be hit or miss and often requires more advanced knowledge of the os or software. There’s also often toxicity like people shaming for not knowing everything about the application or os. Commercial support is often dedicated and may even remote into your computer. I’m not saying Foss can’t do that, but I’ve never heard of it for free.
FOSS doesn’t work nearly as easily or reliably as commercial software a lot of the time. Nextcloud is a good example. There are a million ways to install it, but now you need to learn docker, or how to setup a web server and even then maybe the docker image is buggy or straight up doesn’t work. The different Linux distros is another example.
Then there’s the learning curve. Even if FOSS has 1:1 parity in functionality, it often comes at the cost of learning a LOT about a new application, or the functionality is different or harder to use compared to a commercial alternative.
Don’t get me wrong I live foss. I self host, I’m slowly getting rid of windows and degoogling. But there is cost to do all of this, even if its not monetary. Plus not everyone has the time, patience, or interest in it.
Then why is photoshop so buggy?
You could be tied to a specific piece of shit you don’t like because it’s what your job requires you to use.
I had to work with Salesforce and when I’d complain about it, Id be given all sorts of alternatives. These are nice but… The dude in charge of what the rest of us had to use liked Salesforce, so we all suffered.
is exactly like saying “why don’t you just buy a house?” to someone complaining about their landlord.
What an idiotic comparison.
Buying a house costs so much money and time that most people cannot afford to, and those who can generally must go into debt for most of their remaining lives in order to do so. Suggesting FOSS to replace “whatever commercial software they use” is the polar opposite, in that it’s literally free (usually in both senses of the word). It’s more like suggesting that someone consider a new route to commute from home to work.
Also, this opening…
Okay, all you open source evangelist people: your knee-jerk reaction to come at people
…is incredibly reductive and combative. The world needs less of that, not more.
Buying a house costs so much money and time that most people … Suggesting FOSS to replace “whatever commercial software they use” is the polar opposite, in that it’s literally free
Suggesting people ‘just’ buy a house is unhelpful, because it assumes they have enough money to do so.
Suggesting people ‘just’ use FOSS is often unhelpful, because it assumes they have sufficient computer abilities and/or have the time to learn how.
Some kid who’s just started writing his thesis and enjoys fiddling with stuff? Sure, recommend LaTex.
Some overstretched parent of two, who gets home at 8 and just needs to edit a powerpoint for a presentation at the end of the week? No, suggesting they install a piece of software, something they’ve never done before, and learn to use this piece of software they’ve never used, to finish something that needs to be done by the end of the night, and that they’re almost certainly going to be using in an office (ie. windows/office) environment? Not helpful.
some people don’t know about FOSS alternatives, i dob’t think i need a PHD in computer science to idk try kdenlive intead of sony vegas
Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.
Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.
So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.
But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.
I actually did jump into the replies and went back and forth with him a bit and I do think he (finally) understood the FOSS perspective. I think a lot of people get very hung up on this concept of a customer-product relationship and for some people it’s a very hard mindset to break out of. I often forget that while “FOSS” is software, the “free software movement” is not really about software, it’s political.
The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.
Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”
Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.
That’s goofy.
It’s like someone hearing someone complaining about a slum lord and pointing them to a company that gives out free parcels of land with free trailers on them. It’s not usually, like, a mansion, but it’ll do.
