Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.

My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?

My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.

the will to learn about the topic

I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.

Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that

These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.

Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.

It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.

Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”

I see what you’re saying, but I also think it’s actually a mark in Linux’ favor that is continues to run so well on older or underpowered hardware. It’s how I really got into it, being broke and able to eke out years more life on older computers when I could ill afford upgrades. These days, I’m happy that I can get off the upgrade treadmill for longer. The most demanding games I’ve installed are the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters and Grandia. I’m not a programmer, don’t have to render graphical stuff for work, etc, so it’s pretty great that I don’t have to worry about my budget desktop being unusable in 4 years because the OS devs have made it a practical impossibility to run on older hardware. I’ve got 32GB of RAM, and my biggest threat to usability is leaving Firefox running with a ton of open tabs for weeks on end, which can conveniently be solved by closing Firefox and watching my RAM use plummet.

Not everyone is going to be a gamer, graphics designer or programmer that really needs the latest and greatest in hardware. In fact, I’d wager the majority of people won’t notice an improvement outside of a few cases. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD, <16GB of RAM to >16GB of RAM and from an older graphics card to a newer one that supports 4K are pretty easy differences to note in normal use. Those aside, I think most people would be hard-pressed to identify an objective difference in the quality of their browsing and word processing experiences. Depending on how flexible people are with adapting to different workflows, even those could be minimized, to an extent. I have a desktop I bought second hand twenty years ago that served as my main computer into and beyond my initial forays in university. It has a whopping two cores, and I think I might have managed to get 16GB of RAM into it. It’d probably suck for web browsing and wouldn’t be terribly efficient for power use, but I bet you if I reinstalled things, it would work just fine for serving up my music library via mpd, playing it with ncmpcpp and writing term papers in Auctex, same as it did back then. Even if I put an older version of Windows on it like Windows 7, I bet it would struggle to run those same programs on top of the base OS. That’s legitimately impressive, when you think about it.

Perhaps it’s changed in the years since I ditched Windows, but at least for a good while, just knowing what Linux was as a concept already represented a certain degree of awareness of tech that would have me surprised if they were unable to do any sort of troubleshooting. Whether or not they decide it’s worth their time to do so was a different matter, of course.

That said, while being too hostile to new users is detrimental to broader adoption, the level of handholding that many users want just isn’t reasonable to expect from a free OS being supported by volunteers. There’s only so many times I’m going to put up with something like:

“My computer says it has an error.”

“What’s the error?”

“I don’t know, it doesn’t work.”

on and on for a dozen messages or more only to realize the message is literally right in front of them the whole time and they’re just deliberately being helpless, rather than put in any modicum of effort. After a while, I’m looking up if anyone has found a method to throttle someone via the internet the next time I see one.

Yes, you do need a certain level of independence to run Linux. I’m not sure why we make so many excuses for self-sabotage with computers, though. These are ubiquitous devices, and they’ve been around for a fair bit. I could understand someone who retired in the early 90s never having gotten into them, but it’s absurd otherwise. So many people have an attitude with computers that would be like someone who’s never looked at a cookbook, a youtube cooking channel or even done a cursory google search for a recipe coming to a stranger and saying, “Hey, I’m bad at cooking, so I don’t get all this cooking stuff, but could you teach me to make beef bourguignon? Oh, and I need you to do it for free. What do you mean, ‘chop the onions’? I told you I’m not a culinary person, I don’t know this stuff. What, I need a knife for this? Oh my god, this is so complicated, can’t you just show me an easy way?”

Even the person with the best of intentions will burn out helping with this sort of stuff, day after day, in their spare time. When it comes to tech support, many non-tech people have an absolutely insane sense of entitlement to the time and effort of strangers volunteering on the internet. Unless someone whips up an absolutely idiot-proof UI for Linux that is entirely self-explanatory, users will need to choose between putting in some amount of effort in the form of educating themselves even the slightest bit, or paying for the privilege of having someone else manage their computing and be at the mercy of that third-party whenever it makes a decision they dislike enough, or just ceases providing support altogether.

I once had someone at school declare, “Oh shit, you’re hacking stuff!”. I forget exactly what I was doing at the moment, but I either had a Latex doc open in vim, or I had ncmpcpp open. Not nearly as exciting as whatever he was imagining.

I feel as though I missed the heyday of youtube, and only really started using it within the last few years, so perhaps my perspective is a bit skewed, but I don’t really get the point of a lot of content on there. A lot of the content I consume could easily be replicated elsewhere, or in a different format. A good deal of tech content I consume would be improved, in my view, if it were just a website with an associated discussion forum for clarifying or expanding upon any points people don’t fully get. Plenty of food channels would be better if they were just a cookbook, because they waste so much time on stuff nobody cares about in order to hit a magic length for the algorithm. Most of the long form stuff I come across could just be podcasts without losing anything of value for me.

I’m entirely willing to say this may well be my “old man yells at clouds” moment, but I just don’t get the majority of youtube content. The appeal of things like Lets Plays (outside of seeing exactly how to beat a spot you’re stuck on) and Vtubers is completely alien to me. I do enjoy travel content, but I find a lot of the stuff uploaded by independent youtube creators to be pretty exploitative and don’t enjoy watching it. I don’t think BBC or Arte or the like willl disappear with youtube. I doubt I’ll miss it very much when it eventually gets killed and Google launches a worse video site one of these days.