My parents know one and it's windows. One time my dad messaged me at work to ask if his laptop had windows xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11, so he doesn't even know the version differences :p
My mom may also say "samsung" as an operating system if you prod enough, but she also knows their laptop has windows 11, so she knows more than my dad
So that's what the average non-tech person thinks about OSes
Yeah. A typical non-tech person is just as likely to say their PC is running on Microsoft or Google. Maybe they'll say Edge if they are really knowledgeable.
I once had a user all me to "install the latest version of the internet on her computer".
My first thought was "that's gonna take a hot minute..."
She was referring to wanting the latest version of internet explorer, of course, but it didn't stop my "take everything literally" brain from going on a humorous aside imagining downloading the entire internet to this users machine.
For real! I'm still unable to explain what an OS is to my 14-yo daughter. I tried several analogies but I always have the impression she says she gets it just to shut me up so she can carry on watching Tiktok videos.
starting from stratch is a good way to learn. Basic circuits, what electricity is, etc. Then you move onto diodes and transistors. Then memory and binary systems. Then assembly, c, etc.
Also, have you tried convincing them to move from stuff like tiktok to foss apps like loops?
Yep, my first level tech support experience absolutely confirms this. The question what operating system the client uses has gotten me a wide variety of answers, and most of them did not have anything to do with operating systems.
When I was a child, Windows 95 came out and people bought it without owning a computer, deciding they would get a household PC now.
That level of hype is biblical and it sticks.
Edit: Then of course, Bill openly said he likes Windows being pirated because it would be the OS of choice of everyone. People would only know Windows.
While I don't disagree with this in principal, it's important to distinguish between stupidity and ignorance. Most people don't know about OSes because they've never needed to learn more than how to do basic tasks, and so are ignorant of how they work, what alternatives are out there, and why someone might choose one. This is very different to being incapable of those technicalities if shown a good reason to do so.
I always think about the effort to create a bear proof trash can in Yosemite that gave us the phrase “there is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist”.
On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
That sounds like my ex colleague. He could not comprehend people typing non numbers into his input boxes on his little application and I had to break thing à down for him. He actually got upset over it. "It asks for a positive, integer value. What's unclear about that? Why would you type text in?" sigh
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Am in tech. Surrounded by tech people. Front devs, back devs, data engineers, data scientists and analysts, IT techs...
They know windows. They know macOS as an "easier alternative for normies". Some of them even prefer it because it's "easy". A few of them even know there's a terminal somewhere, but wouldn't git commit from the command line even if their life depended on it.
A lot of them have heard of Linux, in a distant and nebulous way. Most of them still believe that Linux is confined to the server space or a weird dev environment inside WSL because you're developing for servers, that you can't daily drive Linux as a desktop, or that you can't game on Linux. None of them would consider switching even if they spend their day complaining about how shitty windows is.
This is true for about 95% of the tech people I interact with btw. Big tech psyop is real.
One of my developer interns only ever uses the visual Git plugin in IntelliJ. It seems to work for him, but I can't figure it out at all for the life of me; something about the visuals made it so difficult for me to parse. I'll stick to my terminal, thanks.
I prefer a GUI for most stuff. They're way more discoverable, you don't have to memorize cryptic flags, and the mouse is just the more efficient input device to me.
Still I can use a terminal if I have to, that's just part of the job to me.
I mean, I can - I know how, but boy having the GUI is nice. I can put a commit message title and a detailed message in a way that works well with my brain. Using two -m flags will never click with me, and yes, I had to look it up again just to leave this comment.
MacOS has less "hiccups" when running containers compared to windows. We can't run Linux as main os on our machines because support doesn't want to support that, so we run it in docker for our dev work.
They know macOS as an "easier alternative for normies"
Questionable amount of knowledge for techies if they aren't aware that MacOS has a nearly full-blown FreeBSD inside. Then again, discourse on Reddit and Lemmy is the same way. But a lot of webdevs love MacOS, which also leads to tons of open-source utils for it, that I don't have to download as binaries from a site last updated in 2016.
There's a sorta-famous photo from CERN, from early 2010s, with a room full of folks who work there, all with Macbooks. A dude I know went to CERN sometimes for his university, and came to me with a question of why he's seen so many Macs there. I explained that it's a Unix but with a GUI made for people.
Yeah after almost 20 years of mandatory winslop workstation use, I finally had the opportunity to get a Mac work laptop. It's night and day. Still not Linux, and I had to learn a new UX in record time but at least everything I need and the environment I'm familiar with runs natively instead of having to fight this WSL shit every hour of every day.
Similar position... Definitely accurate from my experience as well. There's a couple that clearly know, but a lot that don't even though they are deep in tech fields.
Working as a dev, I have the same experience. The few times I've tried to bring Linux up as a viable option to the OS we're all forced to use at work, and most of us hate using (Win11), there's little to no interest. There's a few Mac users on my team, but that's about it.
I think it's that the majority of folks, even if they're working in tech, simply don't have enough of a reason to try something unfamiliar, which might cause them new and unknown problems, or require them to rethink how they use computes, on their own machines. Even though I'm pretty sure that most would prefer it, given some time.
It's first in the last few years we've begun seeing somewhat stable gaming distros for Linux, which doesn't require a ton of fiddling for every single game.
Yet kernel level anti cheat is still an issue, so if you want to play some of the big PvP games. There's a lot of inconvenience to get them rolling
No shit I did this for my partners grandparent. All they needed was the browser to do shit like Facebook and paying bills. Slapped Linux Mint on their near dinosaur laptop with a Windows theme and they were none the wiser.
I swear I saw a comment around here that said "the average user does not want bloatware like systemd on their computer" and I just kind of wonder if we are all living on the same planet sometimes.
I started building pcs to replace cable boxes for people. The realization I had is that most people's understanding of technology starts and ends with their phone.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking
I mean, computer science is basically the mathematics of computation. It's not like the people working on knot theory or topology are great with 3d art or knitting
Computer science has many fields and those even differ per country. Theoretical computer science is only one part of it. There are also many specialisations.
But you make a good point about topology and knot theory.
I work in the IT department at a university. Can confirm that many comp sci majors have no idea how a computer works, or even how to install an operating system. They sure know how to write code though.
Most cs degrees I've seen, including my own include an operating systems course.
"How a computer works"
It really depends what you mean, and at what depth; theres a tone of stuff in there. Even then I think your mostly wrong, you just notice/remember the ones who are inept at using their computer.
So, there are a couple of things. Here is where I push up my glasses and say "well--ahem--"
First, true, BSD is not itself Unix. That specific OS (which began with the PDP-7 Operating System in the late 1960s) really only existed until the late 80s or early 90s, when Bell Labs stopped working on it.
However, it is literally Unix-based. The first version of BSD was forked (as we'd call it today) from the Research Unix source code at UC Berkeley. Since then, the various BSD derivatives and distros have all iterated upon or forked from that initial Unix code. I don't think any are officially registered as SUS systems (but there are only a handful that are), which means that a pedant would say that BSD is technically "Unix-like."
But it is based on Unix, it's a part of the Unix family, just like Windows 11 is part of the NT family. MacOS is also part of the Unix family (I think it might be or used to have been SUS-registered, actually). Linux isn't, and I think I remember hearing that Torvalds didn't even use the Research Unix source code to write the Linux kernel originally, but it does follow a lot of the SUS spec and so is definitely Unix-like.
We got a historian over here! Lol
Twins is a bit strong as a descriptor but the spirit of it might be apt enough.
I wish I had learned more about BSD before getting so ingrained in Linux. Not because one is "better" or anything. They're just two different worlds. I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to explore it the way I'd like to, like I did with Linux.
But who knows, it's just one step more than all the distro and setup hopping I've done over the years.
If you try FreeBSD you get ZFS as the file system and PF (OpenBSD's creation) as the firewall. Sound and video will be a little different to set up, but most applications are going to work the same these days.
Yeah, I think it's a fair characterization, I just wanted to clarify that it is indeed based on Unix.
To my knowledge I've never used BSD. I didn't move away from Windows until I, like you say, just didn't have the bandwidth to do more than one experimental thing with my computer. Windows pushed me out a few years back, and I went with Linux because of the breadth of support.
I've got tons of time to do research, though. By which I mean read random Wikipedia articles in the bathroom, TBH. I found a big tree somewhere on there a long time ago, showing the progression from PDP Unix all the way to the latest FreeBSD (with Linux as a little tag on the side, lol).
Thanks for the writeup, I have trouble falling asleep on some days, and rereading it a couple times will definitely help.
Anyway, not sure what SUS is, but MacOS was indeed certified as a Unix. They also keep tools and APIs compatibility with FreeBSD so stuff is portable between them, and not just for shits and giggles.
SUS is "Single Unix Specification" or "Single Unix System," I can't remember which (I think the former). It's the name of the certification that MacOS actually has.
I do have to say, I didn't realize that they were close enough as to be co-portable. That's really interesting.
Well, I don't know the details about portability, but there are a couple of pages in their documentation where they straight up say they keep the tools updated, and the APIs are the same except (which differences are in such areas of which I have never heard even with some rudimentary understanding of what Unix syscalls look like and what some parts of a kernel are).
Yeah, those details are firmly in the "deep magic" realm for me. I suppose I could figure them out if I wanted to spend the time trying, but I'd rather just assume that Apple's engineers know what they're doing. (And know that it really doesn't affect me either way if they don't)
Wait so which is more accurate? Unix-based or unix-like? Also as someone who thought they knew this stuff already, what is "the SUS spec" or are you making some pun on suspect?
The BSDs are UNIX-like because being "UNIX" involves paying to go through a certification process, and I don't believe any of them target strict compliance. Solaris is a UNIX, as is HP-UX, AIX, and Apple OSX.
Both are accurate. Something can be Unix-like (using many of the same paradigms and keywords and such) without being derived from the source code of Unix, but BSD actually is originally based on that code. Linux is Unix-like but not Unix-based. BSD is both, as is MacOS. Windows is neither.
SUS means "Single Unix Specification," I think. When it went from being an OS to being a spec, that's what they called the certification.
Though "SUSpect" would be a great pun on the idea, yeah. Big "Among Us" opportunities.
I didn't mean that either results specifically from nature or nurture, but that there's a lot of nuance between the two that makes me think of that kind of "forbidden experiment".
It's the same fabric as any human culture, I suppose, which is endlessly fascinating.
A separate family of operating systems. It's a direct decendant of the old UNIX. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are the most common distributions.
It shares a lot of the same userspace tools as Linux (the GNUserspace, if you will), so if you're used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance. However, the underlying mechanisms can feel a bit strange at first once you try it out.
I used FreeBSD as my daily driver back in the day, but now I'm also on Mint, mostly because I used linux more at work.
I've been meaning to check out BSD these days to see how far it's come since I last used it 20ish years ago, I just haven't gotten around to it.
I also remember hearing someone say that there are two things from Berkley that messes with your head: BSD and LSD.
if you're used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance
Until one runs into “unknown option --help” and the multitude of other quality-of-life improvements that at least FreeBSD never ported. I frankly doubt it that they changed a noticeable amount in that department in the past twenty years.
What the fuck did you just fucking say to me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at Berkeley, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on GNU, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in al-gore-rhythm warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire FOSS ecosystem. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo
Yeah but you're probably using a custom Linux distro (I forgot what it's called now) to investigate either a Windows or a Mac system because that's what everyone else has, and you're not investigating yourself.
i am pretty sure quite i few people would not notice at all if you changed their windows for kde, as long as the same icons were on the same place on desktop.
Years ago when I lived with my parents I had my mother's desktop setup with a dual boot testing things in KDE 3. Went to get a snack and came back to my mother sitting there playing kmahjongg.
She spent two hours playing kmahjongg and kpatience before she yelled wanting to know where her microsoft picture-it was.
Never even noticed she wasn't in Windows.
You could read that comment differently: People are getting lost when the icons aren't in the same place anymore on the same fucking OS. Just happened my dad yesterday. Accidentally moved a folder into another one and didn't find it anymore. Panically called me.
What about Solaris? Irix? OS/2? BeOS? Certainly people have at least a passing awareness of the most popular OSes. I mean, I wouldn't expect VMS to be on their list, but...
Non-technical people will sometimes refer to whatever piece of plastic or metal that contains electronic components of any sort but does not consist of an LCD display or obvious input device as a “hard drive”. This includes desktop boxes, external modems, docking stations, UPS systems, teleconferencing platforms, and far, far more. If it has das blinkenlights anywhere on it you can expect it to be referred to as a “hard drive” at some point. It will save you a headache if you just mentally translate their “hard drive” to mean “hardware” instead.
Alternatively, if it is a display device (an LCD monitor), expect that to be called either “the computer”, “the server”, or “the internet”.
Tech support has evolved since I got out. I don't remember this specific point of confusion. However, during the last job I had that involved any level of help desk support with non-technical people, Obama was still in office.
A long time ago (I cannot find it anymore, may have been deleted) I read a "tale from tech support" where a user called tech support and complained "my operating system is missing". Retelling from memory:
Tech support person tried to walk the user through various steps until the user said "ok, let me just close these documents…"
"Wait, you have open documents? Your operating system is not missing."
"What? No, it is."
"If your operating system were missing, you wouldn't be able to do anything with your computer, you wouldn't have open documents. If you can do that, you definitely have some operating system. What version of Windows is the computer running?"
"Windows 7."
"There you have it, that's your operating system."
Oh, that's a good one.
I'm very far from being tech savvy myself, so I gradually tried to remind myself people can not care enough about this stuff to learn even some basic terminology or have other, more urgent concerns. A lot of the service industry depends on this kind of unfamiliarity, I guess.
I had to describe a web browser to someone the other day at work. In the end they had to go to their IT department for help.
Though sometimes IT departments we deal with aren't much better. Combination of ultra paranoid security policies and incompetence. Then a panicked end user who I need to try and work out how to help with the restrictions in place by their IT department. Some of our customer notes are amusing, stuff like "RDP still works onto X and you can connect to the SQL server from there, don't tell them".
I use my own custom made OS called PenOS that doesn't even really work or do anything useful, but it does spam the word PENIS across your screen forever.
This isn't quite following the format. The "And X, of course." line in the original is an example that's more well known than the preceding examples, something that ponytail thinks is so obvious that it doesn't even need to be mentioned (yet still something that the average person doesn't know about).
When I started working for a MSP 15 years ago, the world of corporations introduced me to AS/400 (or iSeries, or IBM i). It's not that obscure as big corporations are still using it, but I never heard of it before starting working for big businesses.
Ah, one of my first jobs involved coming in earlier than everyone else and starting up the inventory management program on the AS/400. Never even saw the machine itself, just connected via command prompt through my desktop and typed in some instructions.
Nah, the title and the field where a person active, including comp sci will not guarantee any of these knowledge savy things, also there are factor of sociability between people , one side can pretend and ignore other in spite or apathy.
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My parents know one and it's windows. One time my dad messaged me at work to ask if his laptop had windows xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11, so he doesn't even know the version differences :p
My mom may also say "samsung" as an operating system if you prod enough, but she also knows their laptop has windows 11, so she knows more than my dad
So that's what the average non-tech person thinks about OSes
Yeah. A typical non-tech person is just as likely to say their PC is running on Microsoft or Google. Maybe they'll say Edge if they are really knowledgeable.
I worked tech support in a call center, a thousand years ago.
Telling people to click on the "big blue E" was used nearly every call. Not much has changed.
In the case of the browser, they are still only describing use, not brand name.
They don't know what a browser is. That's just "The Internet".
Edit: I got whooshed.
I was making a joke about edging.
Edit: It was pretty subtle, to be honest. Not my finest masturbation-related humor.
I once had a user all me to "install the latest version of the internet on her computer".
My first thought was "that's gonna take a hot minute..."
She was referring to wanting the latest version of internet explorer, of course, but it didn't stop my "take everything literally" brain from going on a humorous aside imagining downloading the entire internet to this users machine.
Most of them are unaware of what an OS is even.
For real! I'm still unable to explain what an OS is to my 14-yo daughter. I tried several analogies but I always have the impression she says she gets it just to shut me up so she can carry on watching Tiktok videos.
starting from stratch is a good way to learn. Basic circuits, what electricity is, etc. Then you move onto diodes and transistors. Then memory and binary systems. Then assembly, c, etc.
Also, have you tried convincing them to move from stuff like tiktok to foss apps like loops?
New generations are dumber than any other gen! /s
Your dad seems miles ahead knowing windows versions compared to the average person.
I mean he was trying to run software which listed those as compatible, so he just copied the list :3
But yeah, thinking about windows versions at all is already a step ahead some
Yep, my first level tech support experience absolutely confirms this. The question what operating system the client uses has gotten me a wide variety of answers, and most of them did not have anything to do with operating systems.
When I was a child, Windows 95 came out and people bought it without owning a computer, deciding they would get a household PC now.
That level of hype is biblical and it sticks.
Edit: Then of course, Bill openly said he likes Windows being pirated because it would be the OS of choice of everyone. People would only know Windows.
I constantly remind myself of the George Carlin(I think) quote:
Also important to remember Douglas Adams (when underestimating stupid people):
Have gotten to post that one twice this week!
While I don't disagree with this in principal, it's important to distinguish between stupidity and ignorance. Most people don't know about OSes because they've never needed to learn more than how to do basic tasks, and so are ignorant of how they work, what alternatives are out there, and why someone might choose one. This is very different to being incapable of those technicalities if shown a good reason to do so.
I always think about the effort to create a bear proof trash can in Yosemite that gave us the phrase “there is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist”.
It's easy enough to design and even build a bear proof garbage can. So long as you are OK with locking out 90% of the users.
gotta add the babbage classic :
those are modern techbros now
That sounds like my ex colleague. He could not comprehend people typing non numbers into his input boxes on his little application and I had to break thing à down for him. He actually got upset over it. "It asks for a positive, integer value. What's unclear about that? Why would you type text in?"
sigh
Oh honey...
Right? The guy was a 40yo engineer. A real nerd's nerd. This might explain that :,D
It's a feedback loop, if you make the universe idiot proof people don't feel the need to stop being idiots.
If history is any lesson, the universe will win.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
Adams was truly a modern philosopher of great note.
Am in tech. Surrounded by tech people. Front devs, back devs, data engineers, data scientists and analysts, IT techs...
They know windows. They know macOS as an "easier alternative for normies". Some of them even prefer it because it's "easy". A few of them even know there's a terminal somewhere, but wouldn't
git commitfrom the command line even if their life depended on it.A lot of them have heard of Linux, in a distant and nebulous way. Most of them still believe that Linux is confined to the server space or a weird dev environment inside WSL because you're developing for servers, that you can't daily drive Linux as a desktop, or that you can't game on Linux. None of them would consider switching even if they spend their day complaining about how shitty windows is.
This is true for about 95% of the tech people I interact with btw. Big tech psyop is real.
I wouldn't take a developer who can't write git commit from command line seriously
One of my developer interns only ever uses the visual Git plugin in IntelliJ. It seems to work for him, but I can't figure it out at all for the life of me; something about the visuals made it so difficult for me to parse. I'll stick to my terminal, thanks.
Sometimes the brain just needs a big button. Other times the button is confusing even though it says exactly what it does.
I prefer a GUI for most stuff. They're way more discoverable, you don't have to memorize cryptic flags, and the mouse is just the more efficient input device to me.
Still I can use a terminal if I have to, that's just part of the job to me.
I mean, I can - I know how, but boy having the GUI is nice. I can put a commit message title and a detailed message in a way that works well with my brain. Using two
-mflags will never click with me, and yes, I had to look it up again just to leave this comment.There’s a big difference between “prefers a GUI” and “incapable of/completely unwilling to use the CLI”
You can emit the
-mflag and a Texteditor will pop up, so that you can write multi-line commit messages.It's most of them from my experience.
I've never seen a group of people who are more resistant to learning about their own hobby then techy people.
They learn their workflow they settle in and then just refuse to learn anything else at all.
The Linux community is only slightly better with that...
It's baffling
It's not their hobby. It's their fucking job.
@Wfh @VegOwOtenks
MacOS has less "hiccups" when running containers compared to windows. We can't run Linux as main os on our machines because support doesn't want to support that, so we run it in docker for our dev work.
Questionable amount of knowledge for techies if they aren't aware that MacOS has a nearly full-blown FreeBSD inside. Then again, discourse on Reddit and Lemmy is the same way. But a lot of webdevs love MacOS, which also leads to tons of open-source utils for it, that I don't have to download as binaries from a site last updated in 2016.
There's a sorta-famous photo from CERN, from early 2010s, with a room full of folks who work there, all with Macbooks. A dude I know went to CERN sometimes for his university, and came to me with a question of why he's seen so many Macs there. I explained that it's a Unix but with a GUI made for people.
Yeah after almost 20 years of mandatory winslop workstation use, I finally had the opportunity to get a Mac work laptop. It's night and day. Still not Linux, and I had to learn a new UX in record time but at least everything I need and the environment I'm familiar with runs natively instead of having to fight this WSL shit every hour of every day.
That’s kind of an astounding anecdotal batch of experience, you sure more of those folks don’t know Linux better?
Same position and agree
Similar position... Definitely accurate from my experience as well. There's a couple that clearly know, but a lot that don't even though they are deep in tech fields.
Working as a dev, I have the same experience. The few times I've tried to bring Linux up as a viable option to the OS we're all forced to use at work, and most of us hate using (Win11), there's little to no interest. There's a few Mac users on my team, but that's about it. I think it's that the majority of folks, even if they're working in tech, simply don't have enough of a reason to try something unfamiliar, which might cause them new and unknown problems, or require them to rethink how they use computes, on their own machines. Even though I'm pretty sure that most would prefer it, given some time.
It's first in the last few years we've begun seeing somewhat stable gaming distros for Linux, which doesn't require a ton of fiddling for every single game.
Yet kernel level anti cheat is still an issue, so if you want to play some of the big PvP games. There's a lot of inconvenience to get them rolling
I would say the bigger inconveniences lies within being able to play the big PVP games. Linux not running LoL is a win for everyone.
wtf
If you put Linux Mint on the average persons PC and set it up with the same desktop icons as their windows pc they wouldn't know it wasn't windows.
Just show them where the web browser is and done!
No shit I did this for my partners grandparent. All they needed was the browser to do shit like Facebook and paying bills. Slapped Linux Mint on their near dinosaur laptop with a Windows theme and they were none the wiser.
My dad has been running Linux Mint for almost 10 years now and he doesn't know that LibreOffice isn't "Linux."
We have the same dad?
I swear I saw a comment around here that said "the average user does not want bloatware like systemd on their computer" and I just kind of wonder if we are all living on the same planet sometimes.
"The average person probably only knows systemd and one or two generations of sysvinit" "and upstart of course" "of course"
The average user installs fucking TikTok on their computer
and plays candy crush unironicly
That...can't have been real and serious
I live in debianland
I started building pcs to replace cable boxes for people. The realization I had is that most people's understanding of technology starts and ends with their phone.
And they don't even understand their phones.
Most of them dont even understand themselve
A lot of them dont even undersand
I don't even
Computer scientists don't understand this. This is systems.
Seriously, I have met computer scientists who admit they don't know how the computer works, but simply is processional math.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking.
Computer science doesn't mean you know how to a use a computer; astronomers and microbiologists don't know much about telescopes and microscopes.
And CS students have the dumbest "smart" questions.
I mean, computer science is basically the mathematics of computation. It's not like the people working on knot theory or topology are great with 3d art or knitting
Computer science has many fields and those even differ per country. Theoretical computer science is only one part of it. There are also many specialisations.
But you make a good point about topology and knot theory.
Exactly
I work in the IT department at a university. Can confirm that many comp sci majors have no idea how a computer works, or even how to install an operating system. They sure know how to write code though.
Most cs degrees I've seen, including my own include an operating systems course.
"How a computer works"
It really depends what you mean, and at what depth; theres a tone of stuff in there. Even then I think your mostly wrong, you just notice/remember the ones who are inept at using their computer.
If you mean run program x on os y, well then sure
Friend's dad has a phD in computer science thought that iphones have a plasma screen
One of the two is bound to be Hannah Montana linux
I jokingly threatened to install Hannah Montanna Linux on my wife's windows gaming rig, and she said she wouldn't be mad.
If only that version wasn't deprecated.
I believe it was recently revived.
Oh shit, hell yeah
Yeah the avg people won't even know about the TempleOS
Most of them haven't even set up Arch
I use Plan 9 BTW
no way
Poor godless fools.
'Is this a windows computer' 'No this is a dell computer'
oh mine is a "dy"
New HP logo is indeed infuriating.
The fuck is BSD?
sincerely: a non-technical mint user
B (Berkeley), S (Software), D (Distribution).
A Unix based OS, developed at Berkeley.
Technically yes, but there's a lot more to it lol
It's a bit like if you separated two twins and raised them in isolation to study nature vs nurture
So, there are a couple of things. Here is where I push up my glasses and say "well--ahem--"
First, true, BSD is not itself Unix. That specific OS (which began with the PDP-7 Operating System in the late 1960s) really only existed until the late 80s or early 90s, when Bell Labs stopped working on it.
However, it is literally Unix-based. The first version of BSD was forked (as we'd call it today) from the Research Unix source code at UC Berkeley. Since then, the various BSD derivatives and distros have all iterated upon or forked from that initial Unix code. I don't think any are officially registered as SUS systems (but there are only a handful that are), which means that a pedant would say that BSD is technically "Unix-like."
But it is based on Unix, it's a part of the Unix family, just like Windows 11 is part of the NT family. MacOS is also part of the Unix family (I think it might be or used to have been SUS-registered, actually). Linux isn't, and I think I remember hearing that Torvalds didn't even use the Research Unix source code to write the Linux kernel originally, but it does follow a lot of the SUS spec and so is definitely Unix-like.
Torvalds was inspired by Minix (which was in turn inspired by UNIX) but didn't follow Tannenbaum's micro-kernel model.
We got a historian over here! Lol Twins is a bit strong as a descriptor but the spirit of it might be apt enough.
I wish I had learned more about BSD before getting so ingrained in Linux. Not because one is "better" or anything. They're just two different worlds. I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to explore it the way I'd like to, like I did with Linux.
But who knows, it's just one step more than all the distro and setup hopping I've done over the years.
If you try FreeBSD you get ZFS as the file system and PF (OpenBSD's creation) as the firewall. Sound and video will be a little different to set up, but most applications are going to work the same these days.
Yeah, I think it's a fair characterization, I just wanted to clarify that it is indeed based on Unix.
To my knowledge I've never used BSD. I didn't move away from Windows until I, like you say, just didn't have the bandwidth to do more than one experimental thing with my computer. Windows pushed me out a few years back, and I went with Linux because of the breadth of support.
I've got tons of time to do research, though. By which I mean read random Wikipedia articles in the bathroom, TBH. I found a big tree somewhere on there a long time ago, showing the progression from PDP Unix all the way to the latest FreeBSD (with Linux as a little tag on the side, lol).
Thanks for the writeup, I have trouble falling asleep on some days, and rereading it a couple times will definitely help.
Anyway, not sure what SUS is, but MacOS was indeed certified as a Unix. They also keep tools and APIs compatibility with FreeBSD so stuff is portable between them, and not just for shits and giggles.
Lol, nice.
SUS is "Single Unix Specification" or "Single Unix System," I can't remember which (I think the former). It's the name of the certification that MacOS actually has.
I do have to say, I didn't realize that they were close enough as to be co-portable. That's really interesting.
Well, I don't know the details about portability, but there are a couple of pages in their documentation where they straight up say they keep the tools updated, and the APIs are the same except (which differences are in such areas of which I have never heard even with some rudimentary understanding of what Unix syscalls look like and what some parts of a kernel are).
Yeah, those details are firmly in the "deep magic" realm for me. I suppose I could figure them out if I wanted to spend the time trying, but I'd rather just assume that Apple's engineers know what they're doing. (And know that it really doesn't affect me either way if they don't)
Wait so which is more accurate? Unix-based or unix-like? Also as someone who thought they knew this stuff already, what is "the SUS spec" or are you making some pun on suspect?
The BSDs are UNIX-like because being "UNIX" involves paying to go through a certification process, and I don't believe any of them target strict compliance. Solaris is a UNIX, as is HP-UX, AIX, and Apple OSX.
The BSDs should all be pretty close, though.
Both are accurate. Something can be Unix-like (using many of the same paradigms and keywords and such) without being derived from the source code of Unix, but BSD actually is originally based on that code. Linux is Unix-like but not Unix-based. BSD is both, as is MacOS. Windows is neither.
SUS means "Single Unix Specification," I think. When it went from being an OS to being a spec, that's what they called the certification.
Though "SUSpect" would be a great pun on the idea, yeah. Big "Among Us" opportunities.
In a strictly semantic way it is technically true; It is the basic building block of what later became the building block of macos.Responded to the wrong person.
What I meant to write here was: I've used both linux and freebsd, and nature vs nature holds true, I th8nk. But I am unsure which one is which.
I didn't mean that either results specifically from nature or nurture, but that there's a lot of nuance between the two that makes me think of that kind of "forbidden experiment".
It's the same fabric as any human culture, I suppose, which is endlessly fascinating.
Cool, thanks for the straight answer.
A separate family of operating systems. It's a direct decendant of the old UNIX. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are the most common distributions.
It shares a lot of the same userspace tools as Linux (the GNUserspace, if you will), so if you're used to the command line, a lot will seem familiar at a first glance. However, the underlying mechanisms can feel a bit strange at first once you try it out.
I used FreeBSD as my daily driver back in the day, but now I'm also on Mint, mostly because I used linux more at work.
I've been meaning to check out BSD these days to see how far it's come since I last used it 20ish years ago, I just haven't gotten around to it.
I also remember hearing someone say that there are two things from Berkley that messes with your head: BSD and LSD.
Well I sure used to like LSD, but I get the feeling that I'm not qualified for Berkeley's other offering.
You know I won't.
Until one runs into “unknown option --help” and the multitude of other quality-of-life improvements that at least FreeBSD never ported. I frankly doubt it that they changed a noticeable amount in that department in the past twenty years.
Basically Macos
What the fuck did you just fucking say to me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class at Berkeley, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on GNU, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in al-gore-rhythm warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire FOSS ecosystem. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo
I like how you stopped bothering to modify the copy pasta a third of the way through. 😄
You're absolutely right, we can do better!
Operating System
Kernel
It's weird to think about it and notice that's basically true.
MacOS is closed-sourced Darwin, which is itself a descendant of BSD.
Omg, license laundering goes brrr.
In a strictly semantic way it is technically true; It is the basic building block of what later became the basic building block of macos
Okay, imagine Linux. But (most of) the whole thing developed at once rather than just the kernel and tools separately.
AND:
I started a class this year, a forensics class related to computers. The intro prompt is interesting, what computer do you have, windows or mac?
Yeah but you're probably using a custom Linux distro (I forgot what it's called now) to investigate either a Windows or a Mac system because that's what everyone else has, and you're not investigating yourself.
You're probably thinking of Kali Linux 😅?
Yeah yeah that's it. It's not a very good destro generally speaking for general use but cyber investigations it seems to be the go-to.
I'll be finding out in the next few weeks hehe
I would be surprised if the average person knows even one operating system, including the ones they use
i am pretty sure quite i few people would not notice at all if you changed their windows for kde, as long as the same icons were on the same place on desktop.
That is true, don't even need to change icons.
Years ago when I lived with my parents I had my mother's desktop setup with a dual boot testing things in KDE 3. Went to get a snack and came back to my mother sitting there playing kmahjongg.
She spent two hours playing kmahjongg and kpatience before she yelled wanting to know where her microsoft picture-it was. Never even noticed she wasn't in Windows.
I know this happens often but I still struggle to accept that it's possible
You could read that comment differently: People are getting lost when the icons aren't in the same place anymore on the same fucking OS. Just happened my dad yesterday. Accidentally moved a folder into another one and didn't find it anymore. Panically called me.
Yeah, right. Because everyone is dumb. But definitely not the people here though. The people here are all geniuses!
The people here are much more interested in technology
The people here are arrogant as fuck.
They ran out of people to berate on Stack Overflow
lol. Sounds about right. This post was what made me filter this community out of my feed. It’s cringey how smug these kids are.
Don't forget Temple OS
written in holy C
uhhhh temple os
bask in its glory
The average person has tried four or five different operating systems.
I wasn't being serious, but I guess you can add in preinstalled on their gaming console
Insecure kitchen appliances.
But do they even know they have tried them?
I was definitely being silly. The average person doesn't even know operating systems exist.
Is it Georg again?
The average person distro hopped at least 3 times before they settled on Mint.
the average person has tried 0.7 operating systems
What about Solaris? Irix? OS/2? BeOS? Certainly people have at least a passing awareness of the most popular OSes. I mean, I wouldn't expect VMS to be on their list, but...
Never happened. Didn't exist. Nope.
Exactly what a SunOS user would say.
And Haiku? And ReactOS? And GreenteaOS? And Minix? And GNU Hurd? And ELKS? And Ironclad? And HyperBK? And ToaruOS? And Redox OS?
Right?
I could believe maybe only half know what VxWorks is, but otherwise....
And like a half lf these also knows about Xen
i used https://marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-generator/ to remake it:
(posted here in [email protected])
someone told me their sound for meetings was coming out of their hard drive the other day. I knew what they meant but still.
now if it was a floppy drive I could believe them
Hold up, what did they mean because I cannot translate that
Non-technical people will sometimes refer to whatever piece of plastic or metal that contains electronic components of any sort but does not consist of an LCD display or obvious input device as a “hard drive”. This includes desktop boxes, external modems, docking stations, UPS systems, teleconferencing platforms, and far, far more. If it has das blinkenlights anywhere on it you can expect it to be referred to as a “hard drive” at some point. It will save you a headache if you just mentally translate their “hard drive” to mean “hardware” instead.
Alternatively, if it is a display device (an LCD monitor), expect that to be called either “the computer”, “the server”, or “the internet”.
Tech support has evolved since I got out. I don't remember this specific point of confusion. However, during the last job I had that involved any level of help desk support with non-technical people, Obama was still in office.
Probably the desktop tower. I've seen many people call it a hard drive, but I'm actually not sure how common it is to have speakers in the tower.
Technically most motherboard has a piezo speaker for POST beeps. Not sure you can route meeting audio through it though.
I've literally had to explain the existence of other operating systems than Windows to people. They had never heard of Linux.
Have you ever heard something like saying "His Windows is Linux"?
An upgrade to having never heard of Linux but also a downgrade somehow
A long time ago (I cannot find it anymore, may have been deleted) I read a "tale from tech support" where a user called tech support and complained "my operating system is missing". Retelling from memory:
Tech support person tried to walk the user through various steps until the user said "ok, let me just close these documents…"
"Wait, you have open documents? Your operating system is not missing."
"What? No, it is."
"If your operating system were missing, you wouldn't be able to do anything with your computer, you wouldn't have open documents. If you can do that, you definitely have some operating system. What version of Windows is the computer running?"
"Windows 7."
"There you have it, that's your operating system."
"That's Windows, not operating system."
Oh, that's a good one. I'm very far from being tech savvy myself, so I gradually tried to remind myself people can not care enough about this stuff to learn even some basic terminology or have other, more urgent concerns. A lot of the service industry depends on this kind of unfamiliarity, I guess.
I've heard "what is Windows?" from a Windows user.
...to be fair, it's not like the name is plastered all over one's experience with their PC most of the time, so how would they know?
As a former FreeBSD user I feel this often.
I had to describe a web browser to someone the other day at work. In the end they had to go to their IT department for help.
Though sometimes IT departments we deal with aren't much better. Combination of ultra paranoid security policies and incompetence. Then a panicked end user who I need to try and work out how to help with the restrictions in place by their IT department. Some of our customer notes are amusing, stuff like "RDP still works onto X and you can connect to the SQL server from there, don't tell them".
Nah that dude is just a post Unix purist about to launch into a 3 hour talk about how Plan 9 is (not was) the future.
GNU Hurd OS is the future though
I use my own custom made OS called PenOS that doesn't even really work or do anything useful, but it does spam the word PENIS across your screen forever.
If that's true then how come I see non-programmers talk about the somewhat obscure OS developer, Dick Pick, all the time?
A BSD. There are multiple
I touch computers every day - with my hands! Anyone else want to admit to it?
I finger my keyboard daily.
If it makes you feel better, you’re probably overestimating their interest in whatever it is.
"MACOS" ? ... a typo of "MACROS" ?
Edit : Nevermind... "MacOS"
macOS
This isn't quite following the format. The "And X, of course." line in the original is an example that's more well known than the preceding examples, something that ponytail thinks is so obvious that it doesn't even need to be mentioned (yet still something that the average person doesn't know about).
When I started working for a MSP 15 years ago, the world of corporations introduced me to AS/400 (or iSeries, or IBM i). It's not that obscure as big corporations are still using it, but I never heard of it before starting working for big businesses.
Ah, one of my first jobs involved coming in earlier than everyone else and starting up the inventory management program on the AS/400. Never even saw the machine itself, just connected via command prompt through my desktop and typed in some instructions.
This feels like it was made by someone who was bored during their shift at the help desk lol
i'm reading this comment while bored at the helpdesk lol
And BEOS, of course.
Of course! How else am I going to play a video while I'm word processing?
Are these really overestimations?
So are you Mac or windows?
I'm not a crappy OS.
Nah, the title and the field where a person active, including comp sci will not guarantee any of these knowledge savy things, also there are factor of sociability between people , one side can pretend and ignore other in spite or apathy.