Communist, (edited )
@Communist@lemmy.ml avatar

How do you know you’re happy with windows if you choose to live in ignorance?

What if windows does a ton of annoying things that you’re simply used to and accept as a part of life, that you’re missing out on fixing completely because you’ve chosen ignorance?

I don’t think you should say that you’re happy with windows if you’ve never investigated any other options, you really just don’t know, and it’s not shameful to not know or not care, but if you say you’re happy with something, that implies a level of knowledge that you don’t have.

If someone was proudly ignorant of a topic you cared about, would you not, understandably, be annoyed when they give their opinions founded entirely upon ignorance?

I think that might be what you’re seeing here, sorry if this is an upsetting post, but, I just want to make sure you understand how that sounds to the people who did bother to not be ignorant. I’m ignorant of many things, and I choose not to comment on those things or claim to know things about those things, because I know what I don’t know, I think it’s wise to do that.

Furthermore a number of people have a genuine emotional investment in FOSS that you may not understand, there are good reasons for this, the world would be a significantly better place if FOSS was the norm, for example, in electron microscopy, there are perfectly good electron microscopes that are no longer supported by their companies, forced to run windows 95 and that can never be updated because of proprietary software, the only way of updating these would be to spend literal millions of dollars on this. There’s various aspects of healthcare that would be dramatically improved by FOSS being the norm, when you know many many things like this, people often form an emotional attachment to these things that you may not understand from a position of ignorance, and that seem unreasonable. It’s often helpful to find common ground with people, rather than be proudly ignorant.

Especially for marginalized groups, FOSS could be a huge benefit, as an example, when the holocaust occurred, the nazis turned to companies to get information from people, in the modern era, could microsoft be used by a government not interested in your best interests to corral you and kill you? Yes, absolutely, even if this is unlikely, it’s something that couldn’t happen AT ALL with foss, ever.

I don’t care if you use linux or not at the end of the day, but I do hope you understand that these people have a genuine, reasonable emotional attachment to FOSS that makes them behave in unreasonable ways when it is challenged. Especially when countless people who are completely ignorant of the problem tell them it doesn’t matter on a regular basis, this is an extremely common, compounding annoyance for the community of FOSS enthusiasts.

I hope that makes sense, and doesn’t anger you, I just want you to understand where all of this emotional stuff comes from.

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