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
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
He is the other kind of thech tho. He isn’t the programmer kind of tech.
This.
Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.
The bugs currently plaguing me include:
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:
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.