The next comment was “What’s Linux?”

In fairness, there's a 70% chance this comment was posted by a bot that was, itself, being hosted on a Linux server.

I'm of two minds on this.

In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.

On the other hand it's so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.

They were one of the lucky 10,000.

I know this change probably happened gradually over the course of time, but it’s truly shocking to me how many people my age can’t do shit on a computer.

I’m in my mid 40s.

Like, this was understandable when I was a kid doing computer stuff and wowing all the adults - the PC was brand new. But people who are my age NOW grew up with this stuff all around them! Like, you didn’t know how to CLICK? You were born in 1983 what the fuck, Carol!

just one loop they don't know about all the others

Haha I'm an aspiring game dev and I know a little bit about a ton of software!

...and I suck at most of it. But I can hold a conversation about it at least! :D

P.S: Haven't heard of QGIS tho! My partner used ARCGIS though, and would always get annoyed when I pronounced it "Ark-jizz."

Even the average tech person doesn't know what it means.
The term was coined by Christine Peterson of the Free software movement, and is defined to specify software that is free and open source (FOSS).
This was after problems with the term "free software" because it was a bad term, that was hijacked to also include software free of cost but closed and proprietary, so far from open source. And free was not generally understood as free as in libre.
After the Free software movement coined the term. The Free Software Foundation also adopted it, and to distinguish they called it FLOSS, for "Free as in Libre and Open Source Software", where the libre means that the code is protected from being "jailed" because it has a so called strong copyleft license, like for instance GPL. So MIT, BSD and public domain are not FLOSS but they are FOSS.

https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software

/Nothing in this life is simple.

well, file:// is a thing. maybe.

Yes? The number of people I met in college that doesn't even heard about firefox was surprising.

I had a client who was the head of product at her buisness. We'd meet at the end of every sprint to do demos and planning. Anyway when my team mentioned there were some issues on Firefox her knee jerk response was to openly say "I hate Firefox users"

I have tons of stories like that but the point is that even people who are aware don't universally love it

Awareness is just the bare minimum

if they are, it’s not much more than "that thing they heard of sometime", i don’t think the layperson really considers them as alternatives to what they’re using.

i remember, when i first switched to an non-chrome browser many years ago, my friends kept asking me if stuff like google, google drive or google classroom (which our school used) still worked on it. many people don’t know the difference between google chrome (the web browser) and google (the search engine)!

The Kim Jong side eye is great, almost like the Fry futurama meme.

But those notepads. Always with the notepads.

hmm, if it's an x86 chromebook i'm assuming you could install linux on it like any other x86 device... not sure tbh, i've never done this 😅

if it's ARM, then postmarketos may be your best bet, it's typically used for phones but they have many laptops supported as well. maybe yours would work!

i've seen stuff like crouton, chrx and galliumOS which are all projects that are supposed to help run linux on chromebooks, but they're all abandoned as of now so i wouldn't recommend them.

I've done this with a chromebook recently, first it depends on a model and how old is it. In general you need to disable secureboot in recovery menu, enable 'developer' mode, and allow booting from usb. After that you can install your distro.