As someone who knows how to take apart and put back together both computers a day cars, your post is 100% accurate in explaining why people might not want to spend the time to learn something they have no interest in and do rarely.

Regarding the Android bit, it’s so cancerous because everything is locked down and users have no control over the OS. They don’t have admin rights on their own device. Nothing to do with Linux, that’s jus the kernel. Android + GNU utils & root access would be completely different.
People shit on the GNU/Linux meme, but Android actually proves that just the Linux kernel can be put in an OS that’s just as hostile to the user as anything proprietary.

This post feels like elitism and gatekeeping to me, as someone who thinks Windows sucks and prefers Linux.

I think it’s the opposite. There are, of course, Linux elitists, but they don’t want normies using Linux. They love to talk about how Linux isn’t ready for mainstream usage, and it’s so difficult and only super-smart people like them can use it. They’re like those hipsters that don’t want their favorite band to become popular because then they wouldn’t be underground and cool to listen to anymore. If ordinary folks were using Linux, then they wouldn’t feel so smart and special.

It is gatekeeping and elitist to say that Linux is hard to use, you wouldn’t understand it, and you should stay on Windows.

People don’t want to learn more because for most people not knowing more doesn’t impact their fucking life. Just like me not knowing more about my car doesn’t generally impact my fucking life. Because I’ve never had trouble finding someone to pay to fix it for me.

Surprise, we’re the people who are paid to fix computers for the people who are just using them as simple tools. Maybe we shouldn’t be so upset about that.

It isn’t about every computer user becoming a computer engineer. It’s about learned helplessness. It’s about being afraid to try anything new, even something that’s only slightly different.

To use the car analogy, it’s like somebody who will only drive Fords, and is terrified of the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a car made by any other manufacturer.

throw in “wanting to do something” versus “having to do something” – I want to build my own keyboard so I spend the time to learn about them, I have to use Windows at work but as long as it doesn’t catastrophically break I’m not spending any more of my time on it than I have to – if it does break, there’s the paid IT department who’s going to be oh-so-thrilled that Amateur McJones decided he could fix it himself …

Linux is a confusing fucking mess of 30 years of random decisions by lone programmers.

More like 50 years with all the stuff from Unix

Ironic isn’t it?

Here’s the text:

Sure, I’ll explain. I must preface this by saying that the following is my own personal theory which I formed over the years I’ve spent in the higher education system, both as a student, a graduate student and a TA, mostly has. on my experience with promoting FOSS and helping people around computers. I am also a local LUG member, so I have some additional source of observations. So while I cannot quote some Horton McPronton as a mastermind behind this theory, I’m quite convinced in the whole validity of my idea.

So, first thing I noticed Is that MS products hide everything from the entl user in the most bullshit way. MS doesn’t want to tell the user anything of value that would help to understand and fix the issue right away, but at the same time they don’t want to hide malfunctions completely. That’s where one gets the error messages like “ERROR WTF23 in 0x0454234 by 0x13245, please contact your local clergy”. What they do is mystification of PC use. All that stuff does for an average user is forcing them think that the computer is some magic, antl there’s snowball’s chance in hell an average Joe like them would be able to figure that out.

Second thing I noticed that the ubiquity of GUI further obscures the processes going on in the computer. While in UNIX and older OSes one could convey their desires in text (and receive a meaningful answer), Microsoft forces some world of Comic Books unto a user, without telling them what’s going on. The result is further mystification of the whole experience. People no longer even try to understand what they are actually doing, they cannot figure out the underlying logic and just memorize where and what to click, and in which sequence. Every small change in the environment can ruin that whole scheme, which makes such people pretty much useless with varying tasks and whenever a degree of autonomy is expected from the PC user.

Third thing I noticed is that “The MS ecosystem” discourages seeking and trying out something new. People get stuck in their established patterns of behavior and have a tremendous inertia against any changes. I struggle to find another sphere where user knowledge would be so limited. Cars? Everyone can name a dozen manufacturers, many models. Food? Same. Electronics? Obviously. But with MS, it’s like there is nothing beyond MS Office (and its proprietary formats), Outlook, Explorer (well, this is changing now, but more like to “Google Chrome” and not to a variety of equal options), and other stuff. This is not surprising, obviously, since for any average Joe making something to work in this ecosystem is more like a magic trick, and they hold the results dear. But this also spreads out to other spheres. For example, I’ve seen people who cannot fathom there’s statistical software beyond SPSS, because SPSS was “handed down” from generation to generation, along with other PC wizardry. The vendor lock-in in all the major corporations doesn’t help that either. So MS promotes the mode of thinking as ridiculous as “There is no car but Ford, and no model but Taurus” would be.

Fourth thing I noticed is that people don’t want to study the underlying principles, at all, even when they need it / would benefit from it. Since the whole thing has been streamlined for them in a series of magical mumbo-jumbo, and any attempt to figure things out Of any, of course) endtd with some fucked-up shit like registry editing or scrapping together a bunch of unrelated files to replace the existing ones, or downloading something cryptic and running it without any clue of what it does, they see the whole thing as a heavy, useless burden on them. They won’t learn how to use Office products properly (first and foremost, how to use styles and stuff to get proper formatting), because they expect to be fucking with registry again or something. They don’t want to try other statistical software because they fear they’ll have to deal with some undocumented shit all over again. They won’t move to open formats because they expect it to be a whole clusterfuck all over again, as when they changed from regular GUI to Ribbon or something. Programming, Fuck no, they’ve seen those “ERROR 233432235 IN MODULE fgdghdfkghdfkj, SHOOT YOURSELF AND REPORT TO THE AUTHORITIES” stuff all too often, and never had to interact with a computer in any way similar to programming on their own (like, say, bash users do).

So in my opinion, MS “ecosystem” makes computer use something mystical/magical and locks people in that line of thinking. Afterwards, people are nigh impossible to retrain, and instead of versatile political scientists we churn out vendor-locked zombies who barely managd to figure out SPSS and Excel. I am pretty certain that if people were brought up in a different manner, say, including communicating with the computer in text orders (imagine me telling you all this in pictures!), seeing the underlying mechanisms in plain form, being exposed to competing options, etc —then they’d behave quite differently, even considering an average person isn’t, frankly speaking, quite smart. It’s more or less like a language: once you learned the sounds of your mother tongue, you’ll face great difficulties in producing the sounds of other languages correctly (thats why Russians or Italians speak English with a notoriously funny accent, for example). Same here: once you learn that PC is magic which is beyond you, you’ll unlikely be able to de-mystify it later on.

Apple errors be all like

“Operation couldn’t be completed (com.apple.mobilephone error 1035)”

What am I supposed to do with this?

Linux error be all like

“System program problem detected. Do you want to report it?”

Who am I reporting this to, Linus himself? He’s just going to yell at me.

This stuff isn’t intentional. It’s just that MS is really bad at handling errors. So they just gave up and put a generic message.

You don’t have to be an engineer to use a CLI. This is exactly the mentality that’s being called out here.

i won’t rest until every driver in america is forced into a toad of toad hall cosplay for every minute they’re on the road

i mostly agree with you. But:

the drivers should at least be able to change a flat tire no?

Same with computer users, they should at least be able to change their software (if the company doesn’t lock them down that is). But they can’t even do that.

Below is basically just a rant disguised as an argument you may or may not ignore it

I have friends, family and colleagues that cannot grasp things such as the existence of other OS’s besides windows, android and macos/ios and that there is other software than they know.

For example, my friends say stuff like “have you cracked/hacked your phone/pc again?” Because i use linux and lineageOS instead of windows/macos and android/ios. No matter what i tell them. They don’t care that it took like 10 minutes to do. they don’t care that it is basically 4 steps. The fact that i use something different to them makes them think that i am a computer genius even tho i know jack shit.

I do not blame them as they have only known one way/thing their whole life. But i blame the people that are responsible for them only knowing one thing.

What i wanted to say with this whole ass bible is: they don’t have to know everything. But they should know something so that they are not helpless when things go south

Is your workshop is more for tech-oriented people or more for lay audience?

I’m interested in this as well.

Please do - it seems it was not recorded on the AccessNow’s YouTube account

Yes, please.

“Guessing commands” isn’t the way to go about it. Read the man pages. Read the help for commands. Read a tutorial or some examples.

$ command -h
$ command --help
$ man command

I have a lot of tab completions installed, too, so i can also just hit tab to get a list of all possible options, etc.

The dominance of Office is because it’s better than its competitors, and because getting businesses to change literally anything they do is near impossible. SPSS isn’t even a Microsoft product.

Also, because of the whole Open Office clusterfuck. People still download that shit not realizing it hasn’t been supported in years and haven’t heard of Libre Office. It leaves them thinking FOSS sucks because of a bad experience.

Most people who can’t afford Microsoft Office just use Google Docs anyway.

Yup. It’s actually quite ironic that this person is advocating to learn how operating systems work, but has seemingly refused to learn the slightest bit about the Windows ecosystem.

Apple is just as bad in a different way. There is no perfect solution. People need to understand what they do, to do it well. That doesn’t mean that the average Joe needs to learn C. He can continue to write down the process on some sticky notes but it would help if he does look beyond the horizon e g. understand what the buttons he clicks all day actually do.

But Apple isn’t used nearly as much. Well, maybe in the USA. Those guys seem to simp for Tim Apple.

Getting them to stop and read what’s in front of them is one of the hardest things to do.

Personal opinion, that’s not because the errors aren’t useful, it’s because people refuse to fucking read signs. It’s not about Windows/Linux, it’s that most people can’t be arsed to pay attention to much of anything.

Source: Worked as a pool attendant with a gate. Gate had a sign with rules for the pool and instructions on how to open the gate latch. The number of people confused by the rules and the gate because they failed to look at the sign right in front of them was consistently higher than the number of people who stopped for two seconds to read the sign.

Having learned how to use computers via MS-DOS, then growing to mostly use Windows machines, and then moving to daily-drive Linux in the past handful of years, I think the problem is more about context. If I see an error message, it’s not that I don’t read them. ‌Rather, if I lack the context to understand what it is trying to tell me—and more importantly, what I‌ can do to resolve the problem I’m having, I’m out of luck and I’d have to ignore it.

It was when I switched to using Linux that I’ve picked up the habit of searching the error message online, and then browsing the various pages (mostly Stackoverflow, sometimes Arch Linux wiki pages) which might or might not lead me to the context behind the error message. If I get lucky, I could find a clue to resolving my problem on top of understanding what the error message is about. Other times, I end up being even more confused and give up.

And then there’s the monstrosity that is the logs. I’m pretty much illiterate when it comes to them, and reading them might as well be reading arcane records of eldritch daemons keeping my machine working (in a way, they indeed are). Copy-pasting some snippets from them into an online search is a crapshoot. I may find something that fits my context, but a lot of times, it’s for a different problem. It might not even be for my OS/distro/package/version.

they should know how to change a flat or put in coolant

and care design, just like ux, is evolving in a way where the service industry takes the role of the user in maintaining their tools

A lot of people in Linux subs seem to be ready and willing to unload their “everything is dumbed down” opinion, with all the ferver of a solider heading out to war. I’m a long time computer user, programmer and hacker, so I understand these points of view, but they come across as very gate-keepy around the idea of using a computer at all. Like… I think it’s obscene that so many people would think you need to learn how to use the command-line in order to use a computer.

You guys have it wrong, I love smart GUIs that mean I don’t have to spend my life writing complex command line statements, why are there so many people trying to hold back the wonder and marvel of computers from people who haven’t spent their entire lives dedicated to learning about the computer? I mean seriously, I don’t expect any of my friends or family to be as experienced at these things as I am, and that’s okay. I want the computer to be an easy thing to use. Hell, I want the computer to be easy to use so that I can apply my skills to building things on the computer and have people pay money for them, I think that’s a fairly reasonable trade.