They’re in their 60’s, finally convinced them.
They say things like “This is the same…”
and I’m like
“Ya because that’s Firefox, the only program you use…”
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
I’m having a very hard time accepting that your 60 year old parents, after seeing Linux, said something along the lines of “What was windows doing for us?”
I teach adults 40-80 on how to use Windows products. I’ve taught over 5,000 people this year so far. The vast majority didn’t even understand the concept of browser tabs or copy/paste. These are people well into their professions in corporate office jobs. They don’t even know what an operating system is.
Today’s 40 year olds graduated in the high school class of 2002…there are people from that era that can’t copy/paste? For real?
I expect someone in their 40s to not know copy and paste. The more savvy that I have worked with/taught knew they could right click and then click “copy” from the drop down list. Ctrl+c blew some peoples minds when I showed it.
People who are good with tech VASTLY overestimate the general public’s tech literacy. But don’t take my word for it, take this study’s word: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
As a Gen X member who is 50 yrs old, a grandparent of two Grand kids, I never touched a computer until I was 12 years old (1986), this, I think gave me a head start into the computer world with an old Radio Shack Color Computer II (hooked up to my TV) with a Tape Drive to load programs with. With some of the older Gen X group starting to reach retirement age, I think we will probably have a larger portion of the population more adapted to computer than the Boomers before us. That’s not to say that during the 80’s and 90’s everyone was into computers though. The important thing was that schools had Timex Sinclair computers and mostly Apple II computers which were the workhorses even into my high school years in the early 90’s, so exposure to computer basics such as copy/paste and Word processing were certainly well know then!
I say all of this to mention that while right now, some of the older generation generally knows how to copy/paste, isn’t scared of breaking the computer and pretty much get a long fine with them. I’m more skilled than my peers in a lot of areas but that’s because I’ve used them non stop for so long and the others used them only in school but never saw the value until around Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
I believe there will be a shift of more computer literacy as the Millennials and Gen Z’s reach my age and older. The writers then may say that compared to the previous generation (ours), that they are miles ahead in their skills and literacy. Even my Grand kids are growing up with exposure to tablets and phones (VERY SPARINGLY), but also live out in the rural country so are getting great life exposure to great outdoors. :) (Ages 2 and 6). One can only dare to imagine what technology we may have 40-50 years from now when they reach my age range.
We must live in entirely different realities then. I’m 50, and I find myself being the goto guy for anything tech for anyone between 15 and 40 in my environment. It just so happens that most tech savvy people in my environment are between 45 and 65 years old.
People who are good with tech VASTLY overestimate the general public’s tech literacy.
I do not use Google products or use FB or most social media and family looks at me as if I am from Mars. Some do not even know what Linux even is. If I installed it on their machine and didn’t tell them what it was, they would just think it is “another” Windows.
Once a non-tech guy asked how I find stuff if I did not use Google Search. Another thought that I used Terminal, not because I need it but because I wanted to look Retro.
To plenty computers or tech in general are not their thing.
I’ve met people who don’t know what a URL is.
The kind of people that google “facebook” when they want to visit facebook.
Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.
Completely flabbergasted that we run internal services not indexable by google.
This is why it’s becoming the norm to have an Intranet with a links page to all of the internal and external webpages employees rely upon. Just make that the browser homepage with Kerberos authentication and the employees never need to know URLs or Google the internal/external service they’re trying to access
I think you’re overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you’ll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.
While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it’s the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.
There’s a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they’ve seen that things aren’t so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.
Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.
Great! I’ve got my Dad on it, just need to get my mom off of her iPad now
iPads are solid devices. They’re expensive yeah but at least it’s not a fucking Windows tablet. And if you need something just downright idiot proof Apple has got your back.
Somehow iOS confused my technology illiterate mother, but she knows how to use Android.
Because ios/ipados ui is very bad and unintuitive.
To make it look “clean” and “minimalistic” you actual features are hidden behind hidden menus, you need to use the share menu to do basic file operations that are not share related, and they keep adding more unrelated functions either there in the text selection overlay.
The worse is that when something doesn’t work you cannot do anything since it should look good, so if an app starts bugging (which can actually happen a lot), you wan’t be able to properly see what’s happening maybe you can empty cache in their messed up settings where every new app is a new setting tab…, won’t be able to pick default app for opening something, you might as well uninstall other apps to select default banking app. Basically every time there’s a problem, you will not have possibility to fix it because it’s supposed to be problem less, which it isn’t
linux has 2 really good target audiences people using it as a near chrome book like experience, and ultra advanced users who want fine control of the system.
its everyone else in the middle that needs to play how much do i have to tweak in order to do what I want.
For that chrome book like experience, the genuinely think Chrome OS flex is probably a better option for most people (privacy concerns not withstanding).
Moving from Windows as an intermediate user was the worst. I hated Linux for like a year. I knew just enough quirks about Windows to get 95% of what I wanted, 95% of the time, and on Linux I had to start from scratch.
Now of course I love I made the switch, as my Linux proficiency let me customize the heck out of everything, but damn, that first year…
I wish instead of complaining to people that they didn’t read the docs or whatever that linux devs would scour the internet for these criticisms (like when specifics are provided) and then develop solutions for them.
Yeah, people are shitting on your product because it’s not obvious. Make it more obvious!
(Thankfully this is starting to happen…)
I don’t have a “top 5”, but the main thing was outdated software. I went to Debian because I wanted “stability” and heard that it was good, but it ended up meaning the “15-minute bugs” I encountered weren’t fixed for basically the whole year I used it, all the apps looked like they were made in 2007, and if it weren’t for Linux forums I would never have known that there were more “modern” Linux apps, and I would have been left believing Linux development basically died
Speaking of a chromebook experience, installing ChromeOS Flex on my wife’s slow, outdated Surface Pro made it sleek and fast again. Can you suggest a Linux distro that would be similar on old laptops?
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Providing minimal malware protection while being actual malware?
Windows is just the micro kernel running the actual operating system: Firefox.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Windows, is in fact, Firefox/Windows, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Firefox plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Firefox system made useful by the Firefox browser, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS.
Many computer users run a modified version of the Firefox system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Firefox which is widely used today is often called Windows, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the Firefox system, developed by Mozilla.
There really is a Windows, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Windows is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Windows is normally used in combination with the Firefox operating system: the whole system is basically Firefox with Windows added, or Firefox/Windows. All the so-called Windows distributions are really distributions of Firefox/Windows!
When I was at Qualcomm we had an experimental, internally developed mobile OS that embraced the ubiquity of the browser and the power of apps written for the browser. The code name was b2f, which stood for “boot to Firefox”
Sorry, mixed up the videos. It’s actually this one, from 2014:
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
Edited link above
