No one is fit to judge interest. I hear this experience-nihilosm a lot, that people don't care, won't care, but I also think that we have very hard to learn systems & poor socialization & it's unclear what wisdom would bring you. I don't think we know what people's interest are, in this chicken & egg problem, we don't know how to convey the experience effectively, how to ramp people up.
I'm interested right now, with COVID, how some people's attitude changes. We have a lot of kids & professionals suddenly using computers all the time. Will this prevailing spirit of nihilism/apathy endure? Will not-caring consumerism & ennui be the ongoing course for a civilization being eaten by software? Will some of the population be further driven to make technology their own, to gain experience mastery & powers out here in the vast infinite cyber-frontier, amid endless open source, rejecting the walled gardens(/work-houses) they have been forced in to, to live in, all day.
I very much think the questions are open. Anyone telling you what people want, what their appetites are is using their own model their own view of the world to sell you something. The truth is people will gravitate towards places of interesting potential, where they can be & do interesting things, & those positions are always in flux, always shifting, & there are so many attractors of both high & low visibility which do & don't make it. To me, making sure the door is open, that people are welcome & can engage themselves here is one of cyberspace's chief merits, one of it's most potent & unmatchable potentials. I want to believe people ought want tech, to invest themselves, to learn. But I have a hard time of it these days- tech is torn in so many directions, & everywhere we are still building programs & applications, things that are not inherently connective, and so with a poor basis, poor foundation, & weaker attempts to reach out, we have limited appeal to get the world engaging here. Which is a tragedy, because cyberspace is as vast as the mind & has so few limitations, leaves you so free to explore your own will & desires & connection, your models & how they meet the world.
Most of the population is simply not interested in Linux, soldering, or what a web request is.
Expecting people who can barely put up a bookshelf to manage a web server or configure Linux is nonsensically unrealistic. It's simply not going to happen.
Nor should it. That's our job, not their job.
What they're interested in are the life benefits that secure, reliable, effective, private commoditised technology can offer them. Providing them is also our job.