Whenever I Talk To Not Terminally Online People

You know you've been in tech too long when you casually drop "FreeBSD" in conversation and expect normal humans to nod knowingly. We live in a bubble where everyone can recite the Linux kernel version but forgets that Aunt Susan thinks "the cloud" is actual weather.

The painful truth: most people's OS knowledge stops at "the one with the apple" and "the one that needs updates every five minutes." Meanwhile, we're out here assuming everyone's at least dabbled in Arch btw. The cognitive dissonance is real when you realize that mentioning BSD gets you blank stares instead of the heated Unix philosophy debate you were hoping for.

Pro tip from someone who's made this mistake at too many family dinners: if they don't know what a distro is, they definitely don't need to hear about your Gentoo compile times.