This is my take on a lot of Linux distros nowadays. Give them Ubuntu or Fedora KDE and a windows skin and most people won't realise anything's changed.

"Filesystem? You mean the downloads folder? Yes I know about it. You just tap the Files app"

💀

Conflicted on filename extensions. For the average person it works just fine, and I suppose that's what probably matters. It's not very common for not knowing the details of how they work to matter. It's just silly that the same information is also in the start of the file 99% of the time. It is nice though to have a readable, usually reliable label, and then have a signature anyways for when different names overlap. Wikipeda lists 4 completely unrelated types with a .mod extension, for example.

Pretty much any application will correctly open any file type it supports, regardless of the extension. So it is quite unintuitive that you could have a file named ".png" that seems to work completely fine yet is actually a jpeg or something. But that hopefully isn't a case that people run into very often, so it probably doesn't matter.

I remember seeing that airplane on the VHS all the time at the video store

I'm on the edge of that, it started existing while I was in college, but was called Phoenix, and then Firebird. It didn't have the name Firefox until I had graduated.

I first got introduced to Blender in basically the same way back in elementary school

those computers probably weren't actually very restricted, but none of us knew enough about computers for that to matter lol. as long as they blocked us from going on the download pages

other stupid thing someone figured out how to run was that Star Wars ASCII thing in the terminal (lol looked it up and found this article https://www.instructables.com/How-to-get-an-ASCII-Star-Wars-movie-on-Mac/)

Firefox and, Opera my beloved, was the thing during the 2010s

That's how they became relatively bright, by asking questions to learn about new things!

I've tried explaining what Linux is to people, and when I mention it's an operating system, its not uncommon to hear the response, "What's an operating system?" 😑

You overestimate the amount of people who actually use a computer.

I don't think so lol. I'm not a super techy person and the only reason I know Linux is because of my high school boyfriend lol, 20 years ago, who used it. I think he set it up on one of my computers at one point too. I don't think I've ever heard anyone else (offline) talk about Linux 😅 definitely not a common knowledge thing.

It's actually been pretty interesting watching some of the stuff he used back 20 years ago that has started being spoken about more commonly that were just "nerd shit" back then lol. Vpns are common knowledge now, they were definitely "nerd shit" back in the day. Plex is widely used. I'm also glad I still have access to the private tracker he got me onto because that's grown big too, easy as.

But Linux? Nope. I don't think that's entered the common knowledge base. People know windows, android and maybe iOS. I don't even think a lot of people would know what "open source" means.

I remember my uncle using Firefox, so I thought people heard about Firefox if they at least send emails. As for Linux. I thought like 40% of people at least heard of it without knowing what it is.

Computer Science

I can assure you there are lots of people in computer science that don't know what linux, foss or firefox are.