Dude, in a previous job I had a superior aggressively refuse to let me teach him how to do some extremely basic things on his computer (he’d just call me over to do it whenever he needed it done) and told me he did not know what an internet browser was (he used one everyday).
Now, I did not understand his thought process, but he exists. There are 100% people who understand the basics but experience intense cognitive stress at the mere sight of a command line.
The only things that people “intrinsically” want are food and fornication. Everything else, they have been taught and trained.
EVERYTHING? I enjoy doing things that aren’t eating and sex on a intrinsic level that I was never trained to enjoy. I just… wanted to do those things. A lot of things are intrinsically fun that are not eating and sex.
The training they have received from Microsoft domination has been “don’t learn how to use a computer”.
Why didn’t people adopt personal computers en masse before Windows came to be then? After Windows 3.0, personal ownership of computers more than doubled over the course of 5-6 years and then continued to balloon, speeding up adoption well beyond the previous decade.
Look, I’m not a fan of Microsoft either but this is conspiracism.
Microsoft is not the reason I believe its a pipedream to turn people into computer techs. Its a cold hard reality.
Even particularly smart people have to want to be computer techs. I work with teachers, genuinely smart people, who have zero desire or motivation to learn computer use outside how it can help them teach in a fairly “if its not broke don’t fix it” mentality. They aren’t incurious but they have limited time and resources and they use such elsewhere. My attempts to get them to even try Linux Mint has thus far failed, the idea that I could get them to learn CLI is absurd.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe even dim wits could learn to be computer techs and use a command line, but that requires them to want that. Most people do not intrinsically desire that.
What is your goal? Are you content with Linux being niche?
If not, what group do you think this appeals to?
The casual device user continues to ignore Windows desktops and use their phone let alone Linux at this point.
The normie desktop user who just wants a internet browser and basic office software can easily be won over to Linux Mint. You advocating everything be CLI based will kill that.
The casual desktop enthusiast & PC gamer will get irritated and impatient and go back to comfy Windows. They mostly just want their games to run smoothly and maybe look pretty. Maybe install an application that does something moderately technical for them with tweaks here and there.
You already have the hardcore techy users. They don’t need to be converted.
In my opinion, Linux and its various distro’s main goal ought to be to undermine for-profit OS. Not to turn everyone into computer techs. The latter is a pipe dream anyway.
The average “not a computer person” does not own a computer at all, they use their smartphone for literally everything
Absolutely. If anything, this reinforces my thought towards many Linux evangelists. Hell, I am arguably a Linux Evangelist myself, but I know realistically the biggest group of people Linux has a shot at getting on board (that aren’t already) are the “middle group”. People who are semi-techy who insist on having and using a desktop but still want to be able to do things as easily right up front as they could with a new Windows OS. And this is the group many Linux users seem to aggressively despise for a lack of purity.
This group in particular is made up of a lot of “casual enthusiasts” and PC gamers, which is probably why the Steam Deck represented such a huge bump in linux usage.
I use both Windows and Linux. I also mess around with github programs here and there and they almost all require use of a command line to install or manipulate. And because a command line intrinsically is going to inform you way too little or way too much about what you are doing I end up having way more technical issues because I don’t realize I’m missing a dependency or I glazed over an error that popped up in a sea of text during installation.
Linux’s leaning on CLI is good for extremes: ultra-techy programmers and perfectionists and the exact opposite: people who just want internet and a word processor (who will install like basically nothing anyway so CLI wont bother them and probably keep them from breaking something in a GUI settings page).
People in the middle who are semi-techy end up annoyed because if they want to do some middle of the road changes to their system they have to use a command line or even code something themselves. Instead of just using a search engine to find the 1 out of a billion different little windows based applications that already exist to do the small yet very specific thing to a “good enough” level. Which just requires a minute or two of internet research, clicking download, waiting a bit, then installing a thing. Some of those tasks you can do while doing something else.
Or yes, maybe they end up needing to edit an ini file or a registry file (very rarely in the latter case).
Basically I’m talking about tech users that always use the path of least resistance rather than the most advanced or custom. People who want to do 20% of the work to get 80% of the results.
As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
I still really don’t ever want to work on cars but I understand.
I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
Motherfucker you started by asking me why I thought I was so smart and you can’t even muster the concentration to read my response. Unbelievable.
Yikes. Relax, brother.
Relaxing seems more or less impossible given the state of the world and in particular the state of the country I live in.
I have no angle. I simply inquired into your assessment of our situation.
You asked me a question that was clearly implying an attack on my character. If that wasn’t your intention I think you phrased your post egregiously poorly.
The reason I ask is because I see quite a number of people saying that it’s “everyone else’s fault for being immoral and stupid”, and I believe we should be looking more inward, or at least assigning fault to the ones who are responsible (the “powers that be if you will) instead of pointing the finger at our fellow brothers and sisters.
Inward: I know I have absolutely no desire to participate in a civil war, or experience fascism and the death of democracy in the US. I worked hard to try and help bring about an election result that would prevent dooming the earth.
Powers that be: You mean conservative/centrist democrats? My hatred for them is very intense. But they aren’t people who choose to, through inaction, allow fascism to win. They just legitimately and unironically thought centrism and status quo politics would win them the election. They’re greedy, arrogant, and retarded but they thought they were going to stop fascism with more status quo liberalism.
There are a few staunch centrists that have even admitted that they should have moved leftward. Even that fucking piece of shit James Carville admitted to that. To bad its too late. Stupid fucking losers.
The non-voters demonstrated actual apathy towards the possibility of fascism winning. I don’t know that I can really forgive them, my disgust for “I don’t care who fascism hurts” is too intense to worry about how smug and also dumb liberals are.
Now, would the democrats have tried left populism if they saw it was their only way to win? Probably. It certainly seemed like Harris early in her campaign was moving in that direction before the democratic consultants showed up and they started wasting their time courting moderate republicans and pushing a weak watered down message.
But, this is just my opinion. And you are entitled to yours.
We are also entitled to critique opinions. Letting opinions be spouted without challenge has consequences. Though I’ll concede I don’t know how much it matters anymore to me considering how doomer I am now.
If you want to discuss further, there is no need for the ad hominem attacks 🙂.
I wasn’t doing ad hominem, I was impugning your intentions and suggesting you were bad faith.
What’s your angle? Insecurity or propaganda? Trying to guilt trip me for having a negative evaluation of the average person?
Maybe you aren’t part of the majority of people I think of as moronic, I don’t know you in particular, but the question you are asking sounds like maybe you are worried that you would be. TBH, you probably aren’t significantly worse than average by the mere metric of being able to read and write, depressing knowing how many functionally illiterate people there are.
Of course, go ahead and think I’m actually the stupid one if it makes you feel better, I literally don’t care about that. I care about becoming smarter and more correct perhaps, not what you think of my intellect now.
Because most people are either stupid, evil, or stupid and evil.
I don’t know what the solution is, I can only hope its mostly just the “extreme ignorance” type of stupidity and not evil or “willing ignorance” stupidity and after experiencing the suffering they’ve enabled for themselves that they put 2 and 2 together and things maybe recover partially or enough to prevent the end of human civilization as we know it.
Reading these comments I feel a sense of dread. You are all experiencing survivor bias. Initially when I ran into barriers I gave up for like a year before bothering to try Lemmy again.
If you don’t want Lemmy to serve as an actual counter to corporate controlled social media if it means letting in “normies” then you are content with corporate controlled social media continuing to dominate our lives. Which sounds about right for humanity. The smugness is vile.
Just bring on the vacuum decay event already.
Wanting a good GUI doesn’t mean you don’t know what you are doing.
You didn’t enjoy learning Sudoku in the first place? Did you have to force yourself? Did someone teach you how to enjoy sodoku after you learned how to actually play?
Maybe there isn’t a specific Sudoku drive in human beings but that’s not what intrinsically means. There is an intrinsic drive to follow your natural intellectual and physical interests that do not have to be taught. They are variable depending on the person’s personal inclinations, but you are not “trained” to enjoy something. Even as seemingly fundamental like reading. You might have to learn how to read first, but that’s not being “trained to enjoy” reading. Whether you enjoy it depends on the type of person you are.
Like, if I saw someone doing something that looks fun or interesting, I’d want to participate intrinsically.
If someone offered me money to participate I would be extrinsically motivated.
I mean, maybe, price is obviously a compelling aspect here. Its hard to separate correlation and causation, though I’ll hand you that price was probably more compelling.
That said, the people you knew who already owned computers were part of a minority, only about 15% of American households had a computer when Windows 3.1 released.