1050
foss nerds stop being condescending to those who don't know the same things you do challenge (impossible)
(files.catbox.moe)
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An edit of xkcd 2501, "Average Familiarity":
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked "who still uses google these days?")
made with this neat tool
No. People who are 30+ maybe. But there are tons of people in GenZ (my generation) and Alpha that don't even know what folders or symlinks are. And Firefox is a nieche browser since 10 years or so.
Putting folders and symlinks in the same category is wild. Most people I know (basically every non-elderly non-toddler person) knows what a folder is. Yet only some of the programmers I know know what a symlink is. Not even a chance for non-programers.
At most they'll know what a shortcut is. Which is not the same as a symlink.
I guess I'm a programmer now
I don't know you. My comment doesn't apply to you, sorry.
Knowing what a symlink is doesn't make you a programmer. It's just that I don't know any non-programmer that knows what it is.
I didn't know that symbolic links were a thing until like 2 years into using Linux daily. I didn't know there was a difference between symlinks and shortcuts until I saw this comment!
To save others a trip to Wikipedia, both a symlink and a shortcut store a path to another file or directory. The biggest difference is that symlinks are resolved by your file system, whereas shortcuts are resolved by whatever program accesses them. So if your software doesn't know what a symlink is, that doesn't matter. It tries to access the symlink, and your file system says "oh hey they want that jpeg" and serves them that jpeg. Whereas if your software doesn't know what a shortcut is, it'll try to access the shortcut and be like "wtf this is just a file path, I was expecting a jpeg"
They can also store relative file paths, while shortcuts can only store absolute filepaths. So if your symlink references a file that's in the same directory, you can move that directory and the symlink still works. Can't do that with a shortcut.