Run a second correlation on the incomes of these families and the tech literacy of their children and see what you find. I have a hypothesis.
Fun. I didn’t grow up issuing a Mac, not did I grow up using Windows… Nor Linux.
When I started on computers, we used DOS.
I’m old.
I’m not old enough to remember punch cards, I was solidly in the x86 generation, but still.
For the record, I do IT support now. I’m the one that helps you with your printer.
The Picard Maneuver, inciting violence once again, I see. tips fedora
I take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?
If you’ve had to mess around with EMM386 and HIMEM settings to play Wing Commander 2, you win.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
Looking at the comments, it occurs to me that we’re not a representative section of the online community.
Were literally people who went out of their way to not use a conventional/commercial tech product.
I wonder what the % of people on here is who have built a pc, used a raspberry pi or installed Linux compared to the outside world.
I would bet the number is extremely high. I’ve done all these things.
it occurs to me that we’re not a representative section of the online community
This! I have been preaching this for years, both online and IRL with the IT techs I manage. Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
The vast majority of people just want to buy a computer in a box, and have it work mostly perfectly. Which windows and Mac’s do really really well. And yes, windows isnt perfect but neither is Linux. And for 95% of people the most demanding and complicated thing they’ll do is web browsing, and power users might do something wild like play games through steam or install an alternate browser.
And we havent even touched work computers yet, which is a whole other level of “I don’t care at all” from end users.
Remember people “Linux is amazing!” is meaningless to people who have never heard the acronym SSD let alone what it is or why it’s better than a HDD.
I like to compare it to sewing because I genuinely don’t care at all about it. But I hear people say “just thrift clothes and tailor them to you!” But that ignores two things.
- I genuinely can’t think of a whole lot of other leisure activities I’d want to do less than sewing and tailoring.
- I barely know how to sew a button or mend a rip. Do you think I know how to actually tailor something? Or what types of tools I need? Or how to use them?
I’m currently training a new employee who comes from the “My school handed out Chromebooks” generation, and hol…eee…shit… Its frustrating as hell.
Literally every single instruction gets followed up with “no…double click”
FML
I am that generation, but I was blessed enough (not dirt poor) to have a family Windows PC at home, and my mom got me a HP laptop later because she knew I was gonna be going to a tech school program in my Junior year, and knew that Chromebooks were dogshit.
My tech teacher would constantly complain about the kids who had like zero Windows knowledge, and couldn’t do shit like open a PDF in word, or simply find the terminal. I knew this shit would happen when I was in school, I literally told my mom that anyone who can’t afford a windows device at home is fucked in the work environment. Compounded by the fact most teens are iPhone purists and make fun of Android, they’re just too used to “shit just works”
open a PDF in word
Hmm.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/opening-pdfs-in-word-1d1d2acc-afa0-46ef-891d-b76bcd83d9c8
Word can open PDFs in word for editing them.
It’s honestly more intuitive than opening then with the internet browser (edge).
Thank you, I literally switched over to my Windows partition just to try to prove that (but you gotta pay to download it anyway…)
They’ve got an online version of word and Excel for free, not sure about editing a PDF on there but the online Excel works really well.
LibreOffice has free editing of .pdf files in writer. So glad I switched to Linux last year. Games are pretty seamless too.
Yeah games hold me back. I got teenage niblings that play on my PC when they come over and they want Windows and fortnite. It’s a nice family/friends setup though, 4k tv with game mode and four controllers.
You just screenshot it and then paste as image!
but was blessed enough (not dirt poor) to have a family Windows PC at home
“Blessed” and “windows” on the same sentence only make sense of there’s a fire and you can jump from one.
I get it, Windows is trash, but at least using Windows and Android got me to care about what my device does and can do, eventually leading to me getting Fedora.
The point is that I have experience with having to fix the occasional issue and know basic computer skills due to using Windows.
Yeah yeah we get it, you hate Windows.
But if the alternative is nothing more than a phone OS, Windows is a blessing.
windows was good while linux was os for servers.
I switched to Linux with Ubuntu 8.04 (April 2008). I assume your comment refers to a time before that.
I started using Linux maybe 10 years earlier than that and stopped using Windows at all around Windows 7 (at which point it was just the occasional dual-boot into Windows for a few games every couple of months) and at no point can I remember a time when Windows was good in that time period.
Hardy Heron gang rise up! Me too! I’m now in my late 30’s and still need to venture into the world of PGP encryption. And my daily driver is Debian. Distro hopped in the early years… Fond memories of BunsenLabs #! (Crunchbang) and Slax. Had many toxic encounters with OpenSUSE forum users, twas a major turnoff for a young penguin.
Yeah, I’m having a lot of trouble working with younger hires, and I’m not even 30. If I had to summarize, they’re able to do things like memorize button combos, but there’s just no comprehension about the how the buttons were only pressed to achieve larger goals.
My favorite part is that my older coworkers are still convinced that Gen Z is super computer savvy.
Compared to Boomers, maybe…
Sounds like my mum. Follows the process without understanding the reason why.
How are they editing videos (even with CapCut)?
I can sympathize from both directions. Teaching my iPad generation nephew to use a Windows PC is a challenge.
At the same time I look like a total incompetent when trying to do anything using the GUI on a Mac. My muscle memory is just plain wrong after 20+ years of Windows and assorted Linux variants I keep clicking in completely the wrong places
Over the last 40 years I’ve used Mac, Windows and various Linux desktops as well as the Atari desktop called GEM (used it in an early music studio), Amiga and BeOS. Probably a few more over the years.
I always go back to Windows because it has support for pretty much everything I throw at it and the OS isn’t as bad as nerds want you to believe. Yeah, it crashes and gets unstable from time to time, but EVERYTHING does.
" Yeah, it crashes and gets unstable from time to time, but EVERYTHING does. "
** Debian enters the chat **
Debian can be just unstable as everything else. Sorry.
Haven’t seen it. Only with NVidia stuff. And we all know why that is. I’ve been rock solid since my twenties. Come at me, bro!
OS religious fanatics are weird, bro.
Point to where the .deb package hurt you.
Everything does, indeed, crash; but the rate on windows is ridiculous. I was thinking the same way as you, but a year ago was given a windows laptop at work, which was my first windows device in close to 5 years ar the time.
It is, without any exaggeration, completely unusable compared to my tiny sway or hyprland desktop. Got a replacement laptop about half a year in - same nonsense. So hardware faults are ruled out.
Eventually made a deal and set up my favourite distro on it - all insanity went away. It might not run photoshop, but I don’t need it. At least it doesn’t crash every few days.
Many words to say a simple thing: people get used to software being shit. It’s really nowhere near that bad if you leave windows environment.
Funny. We had a bunch of Lenovo laptops we ordered in for the developers. A few stayed as Windows and a bunch got various versions of Linux installed.
The Windows laptop chugged along and did their thing, We had a problem with some of the Linux laptops overheating. Some just were unusable unstable.
Ideally we all use what works best for us. I’m not going to get into an argument over which OS is better because clearly it has to do with what hardware it’s on, how it’s setup, and who is running it. I also think it’s pathetic to make an OS part of my personality. I use whatever at work, but at home I use Windows so I don’t have to mess with things. I get it installed on good hardware, update some drivers, and the thing chugs along fine. I can’t remember when my workstation at home has ever crashed. My Windows laptop does from time to time because it’s a Asus ROG that it a bit dodgy. My Apple laptop and my Chromebook are buggy and crashes as well so maybe I just have bad luck with personal laptops.
- You’re right about hardware - sometimes it just is dodgy. But a tiling wm is a tiling wm.
- Developers looking after their laptops? That’s asking for trouble. They know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to dig themselves out of the holes they’re creating.
- I’ve never made linux as part of my personality - I’ve discovered it. We naturally lean towards things we’re good at and get good at things we lean towards. I’ll (hooefully) never initiate preaching of linux and its userspace, but if a conversation happens to go that way - I’ll happily chime in.
Have a nice day!
I hate to say it, but maybe you just didn’t take the time to learn Windows?
I’ve had the same pc running windows 10 day and night for 5+ years (I think I’ve literally had to reboot it 9 times in all that time), and it has never crashed. And I have RUN that thing ragged.
I started dual booting Ubuntu and Windows when I was 19 or so and when I’d go back to my Windows partition to do something I realized I had either forgotten or never learned a lot of how to navigate it. I opened it and went “Where is my terminal?” and then remembered cmd and started using it to look for a directory before remembering that’s never how I’d done things on Windows. It was an odd experience.
I had used windows for decades prior to that. Never been a windows admin professionally, but definitely new my way around.
I’ve had my desktops with reasonable uptime as well, but it was on win7 (and probably 10). However, system uptime is not everything. Things running within that system have to keep running as well and they don’t.
I think thr closest comparison I can give is upgrading speakers - you can’t really tell a higher quality speaker plays your music any better until months pass, you get used to it and then hear the same track on a previous set. It’s night and day.
I’m as much as a Linux guy as anybody else, but this really just seems like an interfacing issue. I’ve never done anything professionally with computers, but I run all of my self hosted stuff right on my windows machine (no virtualization) with no issues. The only times things MIGHT go down is when I’m updating. I’ve never used Windows 11, so if it’s as bad as Windows Vista then that makes sense, but then why not just use Windows 10? It exists and you can use it and it works
I don’t want to use windows. I’ve found something better.
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My Windows 11 laptop has never crashed in all the time I’ve owned it.
I don’t get it. There is no double click on chromebooks?
It’s there, it’s just not necessary for launching an application. It’s the same as on Android.
I wonder if it’s really a computer issue or a more general lack of problem-solving skills. In your 20s you should still easily and quickly be able to switch to any OS and understand the logic. If you don’t the issue is likely not limited to computer-skills.
Have the exact opposite problem: double clickers are a hell in a web world !
I’m curious what her hypothesis is, I don’t think there is a correlation at all personally, seen a ton of people who know nothing about their computers regardless of Mac/Windows as their primary os.
A home-built (from a set) one-board computer counts as what?
Should’ve written “Mac PCs” just to mess with people.
Linux users are inherently more tech savvy because there are no limits. On the contrary, there is documentation and free knowledge aplenty. Windows and especially Mac hide and obfuscate everything happening under the hood and you are vaguely warned away from doing anything not specifically blessed by the corporation. That’s why those users are less tech savvy on average.
Don’t jerk yourself off too hard for using linux
Yeah, leave some spunk for the rest of us!
I’ll jerk off as hard as I want, thanks.
Using Linux counts as jerking off? You should try talking to a Mac user
It’s okay they’ve built up calluses over the years.
Just the fact that someone is using Linux at all means they are probably tech savvy, simply for the fact they had to install it in their own. If all prebuilds came with Linux, it would likely be the other way around. (Although why someone would, out of free will, go and install Windows is beyond me)
Interestingly people who learned to use PCs back in the early days most likely installed themselves Windows on their own MS-DOS PCs and probably also upgraded it themselves, whilst Mac users did not.
Which kinda gives weight to the idea that it’s the technical barrier to entry into using a certain OS that makes for tech savvy users of that OS: they had to be tech savvy already (or at least have the mindset of trying stuff out which is IMHO what creates tech savvy users) in order to get that OS running.
…because it’s the easiest OS to install and use?
Linux users are inherently more tech savvy because there are no limits.
You clearly have not met my parents. I installed Linux on their PC because they are not tech savvy. Doesn’t matter if Windows or Linux breaks down, they can’t fix it anyway, so might as well reduce the chance they manage to infect their device with all kinds of malware.
Which distro did you install for them? Same ship, and it’s sinking :'( They’ve got an old (2011?) Toshiba Satellite that’s on thin ice when Windoze 10 becomes EOL this October. PopOS! or something else?
I would look at the Atomic spins from Fedora or other immutable distro. Your Parents can be separated from the OS while being able to install/uninstall user software as they like without a problem. The OS can update itself in the background without them even knowing about it. The Budgie version is simple to use with an easy to get used desktop. It also offers just enough customization to make most people happy. The atomic Cosmic spin might also be a possibility also.
Thanks for the suggestion, will check it out.
It is Ubuntu, not my favourite distribution, but easy enough that they are able to work with it. Most software is also either available through the included repositories or has a dedicated Ubuntu executable.
It also has LTS versions, which are supported for quite some time. That way you can set up a system which they can use for years without having to deal with major changes during that period.
I think that’s a pretty recent phenomenon and it still requires that there’s a good friend or family member who is a Techie to actually happen.
That said, thinking about your post does bring a whole “chicken and the egg” possibility to mind: are Linux users tech savvy because of the open nature of Linux or are Linux users tech savvy because for most people the technical barrier to entry into running Linux is still high enough that they have to be tech savvy to begin with in order to start running Linux?
I think it requires a bit of both.The average user only wants their computer to work and doesn’t care if Linux is OSS or exposes the inner workings of the system more. For them there is simply no reason to install a different OS, pre-installed Windows might be a bit annoying at times, but generally it does its job just fine.
For us choosing a distribution, downloading an ISO image, creating a boot disk and going through an installer which asks ‘scary stuff’ like “do you want to accept our partition suggestion, or do you want to create your own? Oh PS this action may RESULT IN DATA LOSS” is all easy-peasy.
We are able to find alternatives for programs we need, or are able to track down a Linux version. Either in the distro’s package repo, Flatpak (or Snap, for the more masochistic minded) or by compiling from source (with all the complications and parameter setting that sometimes requires). Or we run the Windows EXE in Wine.
Most users simply aren’t tech savvy and/or don’t care enough to go through these kinds of ‘hoops’. Acquiring this knowledge requires investment, without motivation (which usually needs to be intrinsic) that simply won’t happen.
We hate stuff like Windows being a black box and Microsoft trying to push their MS accounts down our throats enough to not blindly put up with it. Most people I know just create the account, go through with the installation and go along with their days.
It’s the painful truth that yes, it requires a certain attitude to want to switch to a different OS.
What also doesn’t help is the attitude I sometimes see in the Linux community. For example, I recently posted my experience with gaming on Linux. In short: it sucked, badly. Some responses I got were helpful, but there were also a lot of ‘meh, that game publisher sucks anyway, you shouldn’t play their games’ responses. Fortunately I’m not a novice when it comes to Linux, but I can image a beginner would just say ‘screw it’, install Windows again and advise everybody they know to stay the fuck away from that elitist cesspool. If we hate that MS dictates what we do with our devices we sure as hell shouldn’t start dictating what our (potential) fellow Linux users do with theirs.
Mac use to be much more open and direct about things. Even the pre-unix Macs were more obvious then Windows of the same era. Unix Mac was way, way more adjustable and while it’s not system related, shipped with iMovie and other bits of software for creating things.
Make the study about iPad/mobile computer kids verse desktop kids and you’ll see a sharper contrast.
I think that we need convergent offering systems because the Fisher Price nature of mobile operating systems is so unlimited, smartphones aren’t even Limited in their Hardware like they were 10 to 15 years ago. Linux funds already exist they’re just expensive and usually a bit of respect but there’s no reason we can’t have the desktop experience on the go. If nothing else you can strap a screen and a battery to a Raspberry Pi and that serves as the proof of concept, now you just make that in an appealing form factor and you’re all set
I agree there is an obfuscation of what is happening under the hood in Windows and Mac systems- but that doesn’t stop the tech savvy from digging a bit further. I played around with resource files back in my System 6, 7, and 8 days, and got pretty comfortable with registry edits from Windows 95 onwards.
I think it’s more that Linux only appeals to the tech savvy, precisely because of the lack of that obfuscation layer.
Can we stop throwing around “autistic” for anything? Have people actually ever met autistic kids? It has nothing to do about having uncommon interest, it imply much more things than that.
I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
Tbf installing linux is not that hard
Back in the day when installing Solaris and OpenBSD and such you had to specify in numerical values the number of sectors of hard disk space you wanted to format drives with. Shit is considerably easier now with modern UNIXy systems.
Back in what day? My first Linux was in the early 2000s, and even back then it wasn’t any more complicated than a Windows install.
When I installed Linux for the first time around that time frame, I had to write X configs (for XFree86, not X.org) by hand. And be sure to get your monitor timings exactly right or risk permanent damage, said the scary warning.
That was always ‘fun’. Trying to find things like the ‘front porch’ timings was an exercise in frustration at times. Then put it all together and try it, hoping it either worked, or at least didn’t go too badly. The ‘boiinng’ noise sone monitors would make was always a bit alarming.
I ended up soldering together an adapter to convert from VGA to a monitor that took separate red, green and blue inputs with a sync pulse on green. Working out the timings for that was interesting, but I doubt any other PC OS could have driven it.
The mid 1990s for me, OpenBSD came out in 1996 and Solaris was Solaris was like 1992. I was admining a Solaris SPARC station back around 1997 that had a gnarly install if I remember correctly. It was on 3.5” floppies and I still have that SPARC station and the original Solaris OS sitting in the basement collecting dust. At one point that SPARC was being used by some of us working with the PHP group to diagnose file system limits on Solaris and build PHP binaries back when I was involved in PHP development. Fun times.
My first Linux install was like Red Hat 5.2 or something and it was much nicer.
It’s absolutely insane how much progress was made from 1995-2000.
Oh man. I remember Solaris. I tried to install that on something and never got it running.
Bah! Young’un! ;) Installing Slackware off of a stack of 5 1/4" floppies and trying to work out your harddrive’s geometry without switching the machine off to look at the label was a challenge. Doubly so if you were trying to dual boot.
In the early 2000s getting things like wifi drivers working was a pain in the ass sometimes. It was definitely more difficult
Lemmites are old brah
my first linux install was on a 486 from a box of floppies we got at a computer convention in the late 90s. Back then you had to do all sorts of crazy setup steps like figuring out drive layouts and screen frequencies. It was craziness but when you’re 13 and want to tinker with computers that’s what you did.
I’ve met people that struggle with the concept of shutting a computer down.
You are 100% overestimating the average non-techy
Watching a millennial (around the same age as myself) simply turn off the monitor when I asked her to restart really put things into perspective for me.
I don’t take any knowledge for granted anymore, all my clients get step-by-step, stupid-proof instructions for even the simplest tasks.
You are assuming they can’t when in reality it is more that this is learned helplessness, they have been told over and over that they wouldn’t understand anyway so they aren’t even trying.
Oh no, these very same people have been told time and time again they can.
It’s not a can’t, it’s a won’t.
Ah, the learned helplessness<->weaponized incompetence spectrum.
Don’t forget to park the hard drive before you power down.
Me reinstalling windows for the 3rd time this year cause of some bsod:
- yes
- yes
- yes
- choose language
- partition
- log into forced account
- no to telemetry 20x
- sell your sole, give your personality up for theft to an aI and agree to never sue microsoft in their tos
- reboot
- find some guide on internet to follow step by step while I type commands into 20 different terminals, open 4 different control panels and use regedit to reduce the bloatware and spyware.
Me installing advanced user linux for the first time after previous process did not fix monster hunter from crashing:
- choose language
- partition
- launch linux for first time
- rpm fusion for nvidia drivers
- reboot
If I had known linux runs games better I would have switched years ago.
Ok so now you gotta help me figure something out
Im sort of a hoarder when it comes to my data - as in I don’t know what takes up 80% of my storage space but it does.
And I really want to switch to Linux, but the daunting task of finding where 8+ TB of data needs to go before I install it has slowed me down.
Actually 8TB isn’t that bad thinking about it. Maybe it’s just time to find anything I care about and just purge the rest, and start fresh?
It doesn’t go anywhere. In the file explorer you can just open the disk and work with the contents. Linux can access ntfs drives.
You could detach them before installation, I did that with windows too in the past, to make sure they aren’t accidentally formatted during installation.
:O that’s amazing
When you’re on Linux, use czkawka to clean out your files. It searches for duplicates, big files, empty files, …
Also works on windows, if you want to clean first.
https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka
btw, you’re creating backups, right? A big disk 8TB is fairly inexpensive. Back it up before you do large file transactions.
… Yeah we’ll go with the idea that I’m creating backups
You are the luckiest motherfucker on earth if your 8tb of data is safe on the same drive as windows.
Id just start fresh. Most of the crap you don’t need. If you needed it youd know exactly what it is and would follow the backup law.
Oh it’s not on the same drive as windows. It’s just scattered amongst various SSDs
I’d recommend Winderstat to figure out what’s causing the bloat
You’re right. In fact, I think the easiest OS to install is probably some sort of Linux distro. But most people don’t install their OS. And Windows is shipped built-in on many computers (even though we’re starting to see some Linux options as well).
I grew up on Windows my entire life, but really only as a user until I got into teenagehood. I still remember when I was 12 and had to reinstall Windows 7, and I was given the option of either x64 or x86. I thought “Oh, my laptop is stupidly old, it’s gotta be the lower number” and it took an embarrassing amount of time to then actually try the x86 option which immediately worked.
“Do you want to install GRUB on /dev/sda?”
Solved with just one drive.
I overclomplicate my setup by having like 4 old hard drives of different sizes, cause I hate to throw them out.
At 12 I would still have been too scared of breaking something, which I think is a reasonable fear, at the very least if you’re sharing a PC.
At 12 I was too scared of downloading most programs for fear of viruses, if I had been asked to partition a drive I would have cried.
When I dual booted Ubuntu about a decade ago it took an afternoon and needed a lot of extra command line stuff to do anything.
Last night I installed Linux mint and it took about two hours. Most of the time was me rebooting my ancient laptop though.
On a newer (less worn out) machine I could probably do it notably faster.
Funnily enough I’ve had the opposite experience: installing Linux on a 12 year old laptop: 30 mins and done, installing windows on the same laptop: 5 and a half hours
My point is that if my machine didn’t take 2-3 mins to restart (and all the usb slots were stable) then I probably wouldn’t have needed much more than the 30 mins.
Thinking about it, I probably did reboot about 30 times for various different things.
Been a PC/windows user and builder since the 2000s and as someone who doesn’t work in coding or tech. Linux confuses me
I mean… I don’t work in coding or tech either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ installing linux is literally just putting an ISO on a USB drive tho
Now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ been quite easy for like a decade at least
Two decades minimum, my first install was an Xubuntu live cd more than 20 years ago
Fairsies :3 I just said a decade cause that’s my first experience, and I couldn’t be bothered looking into when the install process was really simplified for a random lemmy comment lol
Yeah no fun.
Ikr? At least we still have LFS /j
I installed Slackware in ’96.
Things have most certainly changed.
Easier than installing any other OS.
I recently had to make a bootable iso for windows for someone in my family and it was a way bigger pain than linux, so… not wrong lol
Never tried installing mac so can’t say how the experience of that is :3
Installing MacOS on Intel Macs is really easy if you still have your recovery partition. It’s not even hard even if you’ve overwritten the recovery partition, so long as you have the ability to image a USB drive with a MacOS installer (which is trivial if you have another Mac running MacOS).
I haven’t messed around with the Apple silicon versions, though. Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime, used M1 MacBooks are selling for pretty cheap.
Even arch was easy back in 2010 as long as you could read the guide.
