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.
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.
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.
The Picard Maneuver, inciting violence once again, I see. tips fedora
A home-built (from a set) one-board computer counts as what?
I take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?
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.
If you’ve had to mess around with EMM386 and HIMEM settings to play Wing Commander 2, you win.
Does messing around to play Red Alert at 640 x 480 (instead of the default 320 x 240) qualify? I emphasize that I modded the thing to have ICBM carrying submarines for more realism, and played global thermonuclear war with my university course mate over an RS-232 cable. :P
(We could not afford Ethernet, or maybe couldn’t understand it, since it was such a new thing. I recall seeing shiny Ethernet cards from 3COM with some envy.)
a nullmodem is what we had too! I remember copying over Warcraft 1 from one computer to the other over most of a day, and it then not working.
Speaking of nuclear war, did you play this game:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_(video_game)
It was hilarious! Gandhi was launching nukes before Civ 1!
Ahhh happy days and nights.
Autoexec.bat’s and boot disks for everything ftw.
I learnt how to use a custom autoexec.bat that had a menu to select the different memory configs. That was a godsend!
People are probably running FreeDOS nowadays though which uses a different syntax.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I’d add that PCs also had great gaming, which also encourages upgrading, and PCs have always offered more options for upgrading. You learn a lot and can break a lot doing that, both of which add to the experience.
I’ll always remember when I accidentally bent a CPU pin and had to manually straighten it with pliers… it was terrifying 😭 (but that CPU is still working perfectly in my computer 7 years later !)
I dropped a new CPU and bent a whole row of pins such that they were just touching the pins on the row beside them. I wondered for a long time how I was going to bend them back and get them all straight again. Managed it with a stiff credit card edge and was so relieved when it booted!
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point on.
I mean, I managed to fuck up my Windows 95 just by installing a couple of games. God knows how that happened.
I remember!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can’t remember what game it was, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers…
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it…basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
“Reinstall windows” was such a common solution, I still have my windows 95 and my windows XP key memorized (and no, not the FCKGW one)
And it always took so fucking long.
Same, but I did not mess with the drivers. Learnt quickly how to format and reinstall after the first visit from the “computer guy”.
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.
Hah, the joke’s one you: some of us are too cheap for using a Raspberry Pi and instead use chinese Pi clones!
Beaglebone checking in! Although I have splurged for a hardware packet sniffer.
Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to get the proper ones shipped most times?
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?
Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
God I love this comic. I’ve used it hundreds of times since he’s posted it.
I also bet the % is very high.
I wouldn’t even consider myself especially techy compared to Lemmy, but I’ve done all of those things.
+1 though I feel like I’m more average when it comes techiness (if anyone feels very techy and qualified to host a survey, I’d be interested in average tech experiences here.)
Considering linux, self hosting and open source gets mentioned in every community here… I’d say it’s a significant amount
Well, Lemmy is kind of selfhosted itself, sooo…
A big reason I use Lemmy is because I like all the FOSS discussion lmao.
Yeah I totally don’t mind either, feels like I can say whatever I feel like here and people will understand what I’m saying
Should’ve written “Mac PCs” just to mess with people.
The thing with Macs is you don’t have to spend 80% of your time troubleshooting them. I love my Mac and OS X. I boot it up, log in, and don’t have to think about it. The UI is very intuitive and easy to use as well.
I started on Commodore (Vic20 that I don’t remember much, C64, and A500) mostly with a tiny bit of Atari and then was on Windows at home for decades (I tried installing Linux (Mandrake and Redhat) back when it fit on a floppy, but without a lot of success). I guess I’m too old and not neurotypical enough?
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 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 learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
