A friend of mine finally decided to heed my advice and try it out. He successfully installed fedora and was pleasantly surprised by the ‘clean’ design (of gnome). He then enabled his Bluetooth headphones and DMed me that they won’t connect. The BT menu wouldn’t show them.
Now, I wouldn’t call him stupid, so I committed a grave sin of troubleshooting when I decided to not offend his intelligence. We hopped on a call and started debugging. Looking at drivers, support for his hardware, logs for any errors… He didn’t have another device to connect through BT at the moment and I was out of ideas, so we called it a night and decided to try again tomorrow.
By the time we reconnected the next day, he had already reinstalled windows, but was suffering from the same issue.
And then it downed on me… “Did you pair your headphones?” I asked, afraid of the answer. He just blinked twice and the “what do you mean?” hit me so hard I couldn’t even laugh. “I’ve never had to do that before…”
Some painful explanations later, or an argument really, and his headphones were paired. But by that time he had had enough and didn’t want me to bother him about Linux again. Needless to say, pointing out it was his misunderstanding of the technology that ultimately led to this outcome didn’t really help.
This memory still injects fury in my veins as I fall asleep, right there with fumbling my words when speaking with my highschool crush…
Indeed that was my intention. I just never thought that he wouldn’t be familiar with something so ubiquitous in today’s world, so I didn’t even think to ask. That’s why this situation is so infuriating to me, not so much that he didn’t know, but that my assumptions prevented me to resolve it