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 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.
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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" 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.
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.
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.
You just screenshot it and then paste as image!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah yeah we get it, you hate Windows.
But if the alternative is nothing more than a phone OS, Windows is a blessing.
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…
How are they editing videos (even with CapCut)?
Sounds like my mum. Follows the process without understanding the reason why.
Have the exact opposite problem: double clickers are a hell in a web world !
I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker…I don’t know crap about any of that. I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I’m guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.
I think my kids may benefit, as my wife only uses Mac, I have 2 Ubuntus and a Mint, and the kids use Chromebooks at school. We have 2 iPad and a Galaxy tab in the house. 1 kid has an Android phone and the other an iPhone. My wife and I both have flagship Android phones.
Sometimes it’s fun to watch them debate over which systems they prefer, depending on the school projects they work on.
I started on a Mac and now I’m an IT expert.
But that’s because my next computer was a Dell.
My condolences, on both counts.
Could be worse. Dad had a Gateway desktop. I’m still licking old wounds…
I started with a DEC Alpha CP/M, then moved to a Macintosh SE. And yes, I do IT. Where does that place me?
Over 40.
Was it a desktop mac? I feel like only laptop macs should count for the experiment.
Laptops really weren’t a thing back then.
I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
Discluded? Are you sure you don’t mean excounted?
Well it’s not in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but that’s just one source. I assumed they meant “excluded” because I’ve never seen “discluded” used… Ever?
No, discounted
oh nice, 20% off
Must be hard to understand these terms as an American I guess.
It’s just very rare, the Oxford English Dictionary claims that it is 400 times less common than ‘excluded’. I would expect many Brits and other native speakers to get confused or at least slow down when reading it too.
I actually meant it as a joke about tariffs and discounts, not to shame someone. My bad.
Oh, yeah that makes sense too.
Can confirm. Started on a Mac. Was using terminal, hex editor, resource forks, and squirrel basic to modify my Catz installation before I was 10. Windows peers seemed to think computers were made of rainbows and unicorns
Weird. I was thinking the post was saying Mac kids were less digitally literate because of the whole “it just works” culture. When I ran a help desk, the Mac users were definitely less adept. The pattern seems to continue with iPhone and Android users I encounter today.
Well, now I really want to see the results of such a study. My hypothesis is that it actually has more to do with the activities each computer is used for rather than the actual OS. As in, gamers (Windows) are more likely to be tech literate than authors (Mac), or graphic artists (Mac) are more likely to be tech literate than office workers (Windows).
Yeah, that is a pattern I’ve seen. I grew up having to troubleshoot stuff offline just to get a modem on PC to work on dialup to get to a BBS or CompuServe or editing mods for computer games, whereas my Mac friends were mostly playing with artistic programs on Mac. I also used artistic software on PC but that too required more skill. I don’t recall seeing them deal with a command line interface whereas most of my earliest games ran in DOS.
Anecdata: everyone on the film set in 2009 except for the studio accountant used a Mac, and the accountant was a Thinkpad Guy.
Anecdata: Some artists I’ve known told me they bought a Mac because when they went to the store, and when they asked what they should look for/get they were told “Artists use Macs”, so they said ok, not because they wanted it, but told that’s what they should use.
Nah. Windows with ati card here. I was fucking around with regedit and config files, drivers and dlls every damn time I wanted to run a game.
What are you confirming? They didn’t state their hypothesis.
Yeah I guess not. It seemed obvious to me, but I guess for other people it seemed obvious in the opposite direction.
I just want to point out that I was somewhat tech literate in the 2000s. and The Mac OS still scared me.
I started on Mac and installed Linux on a PS3 just to see if I could, where does that put me on the spectrum
You are the
brute squadspectrum.
I played education games on a Apple II in 1998; I was in the first grade.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
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But the time I was ~11 I had built my own computer. Mother was kind enough to take a leap of faith and set a budget for the project. My parents are absolutely not tech people. So they had no idea what I was doing and could offer no assistance other than monetary. It worked out in the end though.
Same here, I learned by fucking it up and doing it until it worked.
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Ah, I once literally burned a motherboard with an overheated CPU, as in the machine turned off when the mobo was black, smelly and bendy and something finally came loose.
That day, I learned the important lesson of having the store install the CPU for me, got a complete replacement for it too.
That game was super fun
Was taught using Apple2 then Macs in Jr High.
I built my own PC in high school (late 90s), upgraded it through college, then switched back to Mac’s when they went Intel.
I can’t muddle through Ruby, Python, Perl, Php C/C++, Objective-C and Swift. But wrote Actionscript, JS, and HTML/CSS for a living for 15 years.
How you start doesn’t matter and Mac’s are still better than Chromebooks. They have Unix shells FFS.
Unix shells
Since macos X. Prior did not…
Yeah. But that’s since 2001. So 24 years of Unix. Pretty sure that covers most recent grads or new hires ;)
I started on BASIC Apple IIe (had the full numpad for playing math munchers faster!)
Then we had a system 6 Performa that later got upgraded to System 7 then even 8 before I was able to save for a PC (Pentium 3 333mhz) during my last year of high school.
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.
Omg, this is the best early-morning laugh that I’ve had in a long time. Mac-nerd, here. From childhood. Also a Linux nerd for servers. This is so great that I immediately sent it to friends in tech. I’m still laughing like a nut.
My family’s first computer was a 68k Mac, specifically a Quadra 605. I tried (and failed) to teach myself C++ using that system at the tender age of 9, but eventually moved over to Windows PCs. Had a Linux-based web server running on spare parts as a teen, though, and did succeed at teaching myself PHP and later Python well enough to hack together my very own blog software. Not very good blog software, mind you, but the critical thing was that it worked! Even spent a few years as and SMB sysadmin even though my degree is in [building] architecture.
Since then I’ve drifted away from the very deep end of tech world, but I would never say that first Macintosh stunted my skill.
(100% autistic tho, so ymmv)
