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.
This is basically what he was saying.
If that’s what he was trying to say, he’s doing a bad job.
The only thing you need to buy a house is money. You don’t need literally any money to use FOSS.
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.
It’s not an “imperfect” metaphor, just a bad one.
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!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
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?
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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
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.
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.
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
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?”
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.
That’s the biggest annoyance with mastodon
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
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?
He is a smart guy but that doesn’t mean he knows everything. I’ve never seen him demonstrate proficiency in software.
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
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.
I think Mastodon conceptually doesn’t care about big users. And they don’t care about growing. Gargeon certainly has as many followers as anyone and certainly understands any associated problems.
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.
What I’m saying is no one cares if they stay or go.
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
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
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.
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
If I had you as a sibling I would use a lot more foss stuff then lol.
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!”
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?
I agree. As inaccurate as Technology Connection’s statement is, this post here is kind of…distasteful.
Is there a community where a take like this would be considered and welcome? Asking because I would like to follow that community…
same tbh
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Atlassian, too.
“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.
No you definitely can know.
Because if your company tells you you should use this software, you do not get a say in what software you use.
So it is either this, or nothing.
Funny how we jumped from an implied personal use to an enterprise use all of a sudden.
To which the same basic rules apply. The added problem on enterprise is that you have legally binding contracts to force the company to stay with a bad software.
this is a really dumb take lmao
You are not buying a house, if the software is free it’s more like a expropriation
What do you mean not every casual computer user wants to wrestle with drivers, troubleshooting and running everything through wine all the time?
I literally cannot remember the last time I had a driver issue with Linux but go off
Try being stuck with an Nvidia card
( // out of the loop ) who wants to catch me up on the whole Nvidia thing lol
They’ve never released proper open-source drivers for Linux, or helped external developers make any, or made it easy to use their closed driver with Linux. They’re just hostile to open source, basically. That used to be pretty common in the old days, but most companies have given up and joined in, which is why installing Linux is usually a smooth experience these days.
If you’re using Linux: get an AMD card. They just work out of the box, no failures to boot to GUI or anything. It just works…like everything else. Which, having spent 20 years fighting with graphics drivers on Linux, is sheer bliss to me.
Oh, but the defacto standard for anything AI-related is NVidia. So if you ever wanna mess with LLMs, object detection, speech recognition, etc…you’re likely stuck with NVidia, and the old routine: Got a problem? Of course you do. Try reinstalling the drivers three times, then uninstall some random other packages, then burn some incense, say 10 Hail Marys, and make an offering to the GPU gods before restarting the computer. Didn’t work? Well, repeat all those steps in a different order. Fifth time’s the charm!
If you want to mess with AIs… there are cloud servers you can rent for a few cents on the hour with some blazing fast NVidia cards, that come with all the drivers and some toolkits already preinstalled.
As long as you don’t forget to shut them down when not in use, they can turn out to be cheaper than a single GPU, with none of the hassle.
Nvidia is notorious for having bad drivers and they serialized their cards so people can’t fix it
Thanks
I’ve been using Nvidia and Linux for 13 years. I’ll repeat:
I literally cannot remember the last time I had a driver issue with Linux but go off
Then you are luckier than most.
Haven’t had any
Older cards work fine at this point on xorg, if you bought a newer card and are expecting anything special then you kind of need to own that you fucked up.
Multiple monitors, touch screens, tablet digitizers remain a letdown constantly. Not always fully broken, but falling just short enough that actually fixing it is a pain and just living without the feature (or Linux) is easier.
Pre Linux 2.6
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.
