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
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
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.
… could.
Or he (and anyone else) could go and do one of 20000 other potentially way more interesting things with their life.
Imagine that?
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.
Are houses free now?
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.
Because the reason companies are brazen enough to pull the crap that they do is because most people have viewpoints along the lines of this post. Reddit for example has almost certainly performed a cost-benefit analysis and wouldn’t have locked down their API like they did if they suspected an actual risk of enough people switching to Lemmy and other alternatives where the lost revenue would have been significant. And they were right, the vast majority of Reddit users tangentially looked at Lemmy and similar alternatives but are still on Reddit. The people actually here on Lemmy saying they’ll never use Reddit again are a tiny minority of Reddit’s total userbase.
I’m genuinely surprised that a creator who has a ton of op-eds in his videos and constantly pushes for electrification and heat pumps citing their lower environmental impact, which is very correct and noble of him mind you, doesn’t apply the same logic to software.
Also, obviously it’s not good to be a dick when promoting FLOSS as you’re more likely to push people away from it, if that was his point then I’d tend to agree (admittedly I’ve been guilty of that before). Maybe that’s what he meant, but he doesn’t mention that in the post and seems to imply that even a friendly or matter of fact suggestion that a FLOSS alternative is available is unacceptable. Like are you complaining just to complain or are you complaining because you want suggestions on how to solve the problem? I don’t know what his experience with FLOSS discourse is, but I’ve personally complained about a proprietary software, had someone point out that an alternative exists, and immediately tried it out and often end up switching. Literally the other day, I was complaining about the Unix
cpcommand, someone suggested I usersyncinstead because “it’s better”, and what do you know they were right.You are not buying a house, if the software is free it’s more like a expropriation
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.
The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.
The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.
this is a really dumb take lmao
Ah yes, put your problem out in the internet, then get befuddled when people suggest solutions. Classic.
Ah come on, don’t tell me you’ve never ranted on the internet, with no interest in a solution, just to rant
But he was asking for a solution, people just weren’t giving solutions that were suitable
Not to buy a house but to get a house for free?
Very convenient that you left out a lot of context, but I’m an open source enthusiast and he’s not wrong.
Who is this and why should we care about his opinion?
He’s a pretty awesome educational YouTuber but this is a dumb take. To be fair, he’s not a programmer or software guy. I believe his background is in engineering.
Even without being a programmer, associating Free Software with a MASSIVE purchase is bonkers.
I know a lot of people (even people who work in IT) who automatically assume free=shitty. It’s hard to appreciate just how effective and influential FOSS has been as a business model unless you are immersed in the world of software.
Classic example of judging a book by it’s cover I guess. The fact big tech is embracing open source software more and more, you’d think this assessment should no longer be the case.
Valid question. After reading his opinions, why would anyone follow his mastodon?
If he’s a good YouTuber, it’s like following a footballer who has shit opinions. I’ll watch you play football, but screw following your nonsense stream of consciousness.
This feels like gossip and I wish that Lemmy would let me mark this post as hidden.
Mastodon, like Twitter is a gossip platform, as far as I can tell. Too bad you can’t filter out screenshots of other social media posts en masse.
This is just wrong, people stay stuck with propertiary software either out of habit or not wanting to learn new things (Assuming there is alternatives ofc). People who rent often have no other option. People who use propertiary software have other options they just don’t care ebough to utilize them.
It looks like what they were trying to convey is apparently that it can be a large time and effort commitment that most people don’t have the technical expertise to figure out, which is a fairly reasonable argument in some contexts, but I do not think they conveyed it very well and they’re being kind of a dick about it in the replies, so idk. I understand the point, but this is NOT the way to get it across.
