Why is this a screenshot? Couldn’t you have just copied the text?
Ironic isn’t it?
at least it’s not a photo of a screen
just missing a scanline filter …
I used to be a TA and would reduce points for students that did this.
You’re supposed to take a photo of the screen, get the film developed, use a marker to draw a big read circle to highlight the important part, scan the photo, and post the digital image it here.
This is the way.
imagine me telling you all this in pictures!
Yes
Yeah, you got me. I don’t know how to copy-paste. I blame Microsoft.
Here’s the text:
Sure, I’ll explain. I must preface this by saying that the following is my own personal theory which I formed over the years I’ve spent in the higher education system, both as a student, a graduate student and a TA, mostly has. on my experience with promoting FOSS and helping people around computers. I am also a local LUG member, so I have some additional source of observations. So while I cannot quote some Horton McPronton as a mastermind behind this theory, I’m quite convinced in the whole validity of my idea.
So, first thing I noticed Is that MS products hide everything from the entl user in the most bullshit way. MS doesn’t want to tell the user anything of value that would help to understand and fix the issue right away, but at the same time they don’t want to hide malfunctions completely. That’s where one gets the error messages like “ERROR WTF23 in 0x0454234 by 0x13245, please contact your local clergy”. What they do is mystification of PC use. All that stuff does for an average user is forcing them think that the computer is some magic, antl there’s snowball’s chance in hell an average Joe like them would be able to figure that out.
Second thing I noticed that the ubiquity of GUI further obscures the processes going on in the computer. While in UNIX and older OSes one could convey their desires in text (and receive a meaningful answer), Microsoft forces some world of Comic Books unto a user, without telling them what’s going on. The result is further mystification of the whole experience. People no longer even try to understand what they are actually doing, they cannot figure out the underlying logic and just memorize where and what to click, and in which sequence. Every small change in the environment can ruin that whole scheme, which makes such people pretty much useless with varying tasks and whenever a degree of autonomy is expected from the PC user.
Third thing I noticed is that “The MS ecosystem” discourages seeking and trying out something new. People get stuck in their established patterns of behavior and have a tremendous inertia against any changes. I struggle to find another sphere where user knowledge would be so limited. Cars? Everyone can name a dozen manufacturers, many models. Food? Same. Electronics? Obviously. But with MS, it’s like there is nothing beyond MS Office (and its proprietary formats), Outlook, Explorer (well, this is changing now, but more like to “Google Chrome” and not to a variety of equal options), and other stuff. This is not surprising, obviously, since for any average Joe making something to work in this ecosystem is more like a magic trick, and they hold the results dear. But this also spreads out to other spheres. For example, I’ve seen people who cannot fathom there’s statistical software beyond SPSS, because SPSS was “handed down” from generation to generation, along with other PC wizardry. The vendor lock-in in all the major corporations doesn’t help that either. So MS promotes the mode of thinking as ridiculous as “There is no car but Ford, and no model but Taurus” would be.
Fourth thing I noticed is that people don’t want to study the underlying principles, at all, even when they need it / would benefit from it. Since the whole thing has been streamlined for them in a series of magical mumbo-jumbo, and any attempt to figure things out Of any, of course) endtd with some fucked-up shit like registry editing or scrapping together a bunch of unrelated files to replace the existing ones, or downloading something cryptic and running it without any clue of what it does, they see the whole thing as a heavy, useless burden on them. They won’t learn how to use Office products properly (first and foremost, how to use styles and stuff to get proper formatting), because they expect to be fucking with registry again or something. They don’t want to try other statistical software because they fear they’ll have to deal with some undocumented shit all over again. They won’t move to open formats because they expect it to be a whole clusterfuck all over again, as when they changed from regular GUI to Ribbon or something. Programming, Fuck no, they’ve seen those “ERROR 233432235 IN MODULE fgdghdfkghdfkj, SHOOT YOURSELF AND REPORT TO THE AUTHORITIES” stuff all too often, and never had to interact with a computer in any way similar to programming on their own (like, say, bash users do).
So in my opinion, MS “ecosystem” makes computer use something mystical/magical and locks people in that line of thinking. Afterwards, people are nigh impossible to retrain, and instead of versatile political scientists we churn out vendor-locked zombies who barely managd to figure out SPSS and Excel. I am pretty certain that if people were brought up in a different manner, say, including communicating with the computer in text orders (imagine me telling you all this in pictures!), seeing the underlying mechanisms in plain form, being exposed to competing options, etc —then they’d behave quite differently, even considering an average person isn’t, frankly speaking, quite smart. It’s more or less like a language: once you learned the sounds of your mother tongue, you’ll face great difficulties in producing the sounds of other languages correctly (thats why Russians or Italians speak English with a notoriously funny accent, for example). Same here: once you learn that PC is magic which is beyond you, you’ll unlikely be able to de-mystify it later on.
For those that don’t know there’s a few websites that can easily grab text from images for you. It can be a big time saver.
I don’t understand anything that isn’t presented in pictures. Also I cannot read.
This feels like a bit of a sideways take. I’ll preface this with that I love Linux, and its been my preferred operating system for years.
That being said, “helplessness” isn’t Microsoft’s fault. Most people do not want to know the ins-and-outs of how something works, and that’s perfectly okay. I am a software developer, but despite the fact that I have an Android (Pixel) phone I generally do not care to root my phone, flash alternative ROMs, etc anymore. I use Linux on my PC, but I do not want to spend hours tinkering with my phone, only for it to most likely end up in a state that is less-than-par than what it came with. I am glad that Android is open enough (well, its not as cut-and-dry as that but its more open than iOS) for the people who do want to tinker around with it to be able to do so, but its not for me. If I’m out and trying to request an Uber, I don’t want my phone to crash every time I open the app just because the ROM I’m using has a bug.
By the same token, there are times where I don’t really want to mess around with going through a million settings on my PC when I just need it to allow me to do some work. That is a trade-off that you tend to make with Linux (though its certainly gotten a lot better over the years), and I can’t fault people for not wanting to go through that. Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t made that trade-off and had just stayed blind to the love/hate relationship I’ve come to form around Linux.
I do not want to tinker around with my keyboard, I just want it to allow me to type. I don’t want to tinker around with my headphones, I just want to listen to music. I use my refrigerator every day, and while I have some rudimentary understanding of how it works, I really rather not tinker around with it - and if it stops working, you’re not likely to find me trying to fix it myself (short of say, the light bulb going out).
A coworker of mine convinced another coworker to wipe their system and install Fedora, and use the Looking Glass + VFIO passthrough trick to have a Windows VM within Linux like he does. He spent both of his days off trying to get it to work (and facing weird issues that even I couldn’t explain and find a solution for), and at the end of today he decided to reinstall Windows so that tomorrow he can have something reliable to use for work. This is exactly why I usually don’t push people to use Linux. If they want to know more about it, sure I’m happy to show them the ropes - but selling it as a perfect solution is a bad idea and only makes Linux look bad.
If Microsoft didn’t make an operating system that was simple enough for users who just want things to work, yet powerful enough for those who want to do more with it (such as making games, or using CAD software for engineering) then someone else would. I definitely get frustrated with Windows, but at the end of the day, it is what most of the world uses for a reason (just like Linux is used for most web servers around the world for a reason) - its the right tool for their job, whatever that job might be. Sure, the vague error codes that you get from Windows is frustrating at times, but Windows isn’t open source and that is not likely to change. How is the old XP error code format of
STOP CODE 0X003ABF VIOLATION OCCURRED AT KERNEL.DLL(along with the rest of the useless stack trace) going to help you anymore than the shorter ones that are generally found on Windows nowadays? You can’t exactly go submit a pull request to fix the issue. In terms of the ability to search for the error, I’ve very rarely ever seen a Windows error code that didn’t have a million and one causes (and^2the amount of potential “solutions” for the supposed cause). It’s certainly not going someone whose just trying to do their homework for school, or edit their resume for job applications.The same thing applies to the whole iOS vs Android debate. The same coworker who sold Linux to my other coworker uses an iPhone (actually, they both do as far as I’m aware), because its been reliable for him. He doesn’t need to have the source code to iOS in order for it to do what he needs it to do. Quite frankly, the whole “sheeple” thing that you tend to hear people say, and this “Windows users are zombies” take being portrayed in this comment is incredibly childish. If you’re not sharing the computer, the phone, etc and someone else owns it - why does it matter what they use?
I suppose you could argue that the majority of people these days don’t want to troubleshoot anything, but can you really blame them? Imagine yourself before anything that you learnt about Linux, Windows, and computers in general - with the way things are built (think laptops and phones, with how their components tend to be soldered in) doing anything yourself to repair stuff is very difficult, and has a high chance of leaving you with a brick (which isn’t a Microsoft invention). How many people have you seen try to fix a software related issue on their PC or phone, and ended up making the issue worse (which can be done just as easily, if not easier, on Linux)? Those stories are why a lot of people do not want to try to fix something and reach out to support, take it in for repair, replace it, etc.
I’m mostly only replying to one part of your message, the reason everyone uses it is not that it’s more simple. For 99% of people the only thing they need is the web browser and maybe possibly office depending on what they do for work. At which point the experience between Windows and Linux is like 99% the same
Windows also constantly has issues and headaches as you alluded to with your error codes. People are just used to how to Google and try and sit there and deal with it for a couple hours.
Windows is the default, because it’s the default. Because it’s what your computer comes with, because it’s what everyone grew up using. It’s just tyranny of the default and nothing more. I got tired of dealing with Windows issues for my family as the resident Tech person so I gave them an ultimatum they can either let me give them Linux or they can find someone else to call when something goes wrong. Some of them took me up on my Linux offer, and I have happily not had to touch their computers in I think about 6 years now. They quietly do updates on their own on a schedule send me a push notification if it fails for some reason which so far none of them have and those people only ever used to the web browser and office anyway and for their needs LibreOffice was perfectly functional they don’t do anything fancy they don’t do a ton of macros they just type basic text with maybe some bullet point formatting
Chromebooks/ChromeOS have been very helpful in that regard. Grandparents that don’t do anything beyond a web browser? I replaced the struggling windows partition with a CloudReady install. Zero complaints. Google account syncing also takes care of backups, so no worries on that either.
Now I am worried about Chromiun’s near monopoly and how Firefox barely manages to make a dent in browser surveys, but I am not going to preach about web browsers and listen to their complaints every time a website coded by an unpaid intern refuses to do something properly on this ‘Mozarella Foxfire’ thing. I can afford to do that in my own time. They shouldn’t have to.
I mostly agree with you, but Google seems to be doing it’s classic Google thing, and Chrome is being enshittified now. Still, Chromebooks showed how little most people really need a computer.
Currently, the computer I use most is… my Steam Deck. With desktop mode, it’s 95% of the full Linux experience, and I bet if I got my parents set up with a docked Steam Deck, they’d be fine. Granted, that’s not the point of the Steam Deck, but it does show how the Chromebook example could be generalized.
Heck, even on my laptop and desktop, I’ve been stuck on Ubuntu LTS releases for about ten years, simply because I can’t be bothered to distro-hop anymore, and it’s solid. I guess ironically, I’ve ended up sticking with Linux because it’s less bother than even Windows. Honestly, my wife’s laptop on Windows gives the most headaches in the household now.
That’s fair, but at the same time as you mentioned most people use Windows because their computer comes with it. Now, while generally just browsing the internet and doing office work is simple even on Linux - what happens when they do run into a problem (say my coworker, who ran into graphical glitches with Fedora when not using safe graphics mode)? How likely are they going to have someone around them who uses Linux to help them troubleshoot the issue? When they try to work on a document that they’ve gotten from work, or school, then submit it only to find out that Libreoffice mangled the formatting causing it to render completely incorrect to everyone else whose using Windows at their workplace/school. How many of those folks are going to have an IT team at said place whose able to help them correct the issue?
You and I would be around to help with that (if its possible - using Libreoffice again as an example, there are some cases where MS Office just does not agree with the way LO saves documents), but given that Linux users are many order of magnitudes less than Windows users - this is just not likely to be the case for the average population.
I get that this is definitely a “Chicken & Egg” problem of course, but the reality is that this is the current situation, and short of Microsoft royally pissing off not only users but PC manufactures, this isn’t likely to change…
You do realize that Microsoft office deliberately messes up formating in documents. Libreoffice follows the file format standards but also implements fixes for issues with the bad file from Microsoft office.
I’m honestly surprised Microsoft hasn’t gotten in trouble for this
Right, yes - I’m fully aware that LO follows OOXML’s spec (the name “Office Open” being ironic), but that’s still missing the point of what I was saying. If you turn in a homework assignment that your teacher/professor can’t properly read because you saved it using LO and they’re using MSO, its not going to be accepted no matter how much you tell them that its Microsoft’s fault. Same thing if you try to submit a Powerpoint presentation to another department at work. Or if you try to submit a spreadsheet to some government department.
Honestly the only time I’ve really had that issue is if I’m trying to use an Excel or Word document with a lot of macros. For basic text which is what 99% of people need I’ve never had any issues opening or saving a word document with LibreOffice, and I regularly submit documents to government offices because I work for a county department in my area.
I wanna add that having a phone, or a laptop, a second reliable device, has made troubleshooting so much less scary. Something breaks entirely? I have another portal to the search engines.
Absolutely! I know the first time I installed Arch before the lovely days of
archinstallI ended up doing a lot of reading of the wiki through my phone haha!
Please use periods…
Is that an image of a text post? I ain’t readin allat
I got a headache reading it
Normally I’d agree, but the idea of copying the text directly for a repost seems a bit weird. The pixels feel slightly more attribution-y to me.
Fair enough
Yeah, I was hoping the description of the post itself would contain the text as alt text. I’m glad someone posted a link to a transcription though.
Seriously this. I read it but damn.
Most people who drive cars are not mechanics. Most computer users are not also computer engineers; they don’t want to be and shouldn’t have to be.
If you want to drive your car with spare parts and tools in the back, outfitted with gloves, goggles, a scarf, and an oilcoat; you can do that. That doesn’t mean that everyone else should do that. It’s not 1992 anymore.
You don’t have to be an engineer to use a CLI. This is exactly the mentality that’s being called out here.
You don’t have to use a CLI to use a computer. What’s the benefit for most people? Why should they?
deleted by creator
I did it because it’s fun, but there are other reasons.
-
It’s faster and easier than using a GUI. This is because you can type a lot faster than you can click-click-drag with a mouse.
-
There are some programs that give useful information when run from a CL that they don’t give when run from a GUI. This can be helpful for troubleshooting.
-
If you ever get stuck on a system that doesn’t have a GUI, you’ll still know what to do. I’ve had this happen when I had to SSH into servers that were running bare-bones Linux systems.
-
If a particular GUI operation is bogging your system down, you can do it from the CLI using fewer resources. For example, sometimes my system will freeze up if I try to open a very large file, but a command-line app can do it without freezing. This admittedly doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I’m happy to have that knowledge.
-
You can get the CLI to do things that you don’t have a GUI app for. Having knowledge of the CLI gives you that flexibility.
I’m sure there are other reasons, but those are just the ones I could come up with off the top of my head.
To be honest, I got into the CLI because of aesthetics. I saw all of the terminal rices that people would post online, and I wanted to have that. The Windows CLI was always ugly and unfriendly, so I wanted nothing to do with it. I learned it because it looked cool, and it turned out to be useful as well.
I’m going to have to interject on even on the first point. FWIW, I’m a person who vastly prefers to use a keyboard when possible, can totally live on a CLI only system, etc. Anyway:
It’s faster and easier than using a GUI. This is because you can type a lot faster than you can click-click-drag with a mouse.
This is just not true for the vast majority of people. Have you ever watched normies type?
The other thing is that even with simple stuff like file operations normal users get lost with a GUI where it’s far easier to visualize what is actually happening. If they get a few basic mechanics (click+drag, right click, double click) that’s about all they have to remember to move files around. Compared to learning
ls,cd,mv,cp, the directory tree, symbols like.and..and so forth. Or perhaps my favorite example, quick name a valid tar command. On a GUI system like windows/Mac, they just need to remember they can do things to files by selecting them and right-clicking them. On a CLI only system, how the fuck are you supposed to get a regular user to remember that to compress a file, you type intarto start with, much less remembering flags (my flavor of choice is usually-xvf.) How many people who regularly use linux even know wtf it’s calledtar?And that’s even forgetting the things like the defaults often being much harder to recover from. In Mac/Windows (and I think even most distros, though I haven’t daily driven a gui linux in a while) deleting a file the default way is a safe operation and easily recoverable because by default the gui is designed to be more user-safe.
Though I don’t think anyone will disagree with the fact that the CLI is an immensely powerful tool that a lot of us can’t do without, it has never been really designed in a way to be accessible to normal users, and I’d be willing to bet that if you were designing a CLI today in a vacuum, it wouldn’t look anything like the one we’re familiar with. It’s why I’d also guess that very few of us that use the command line all of the time don’t have a mile long list of aliases, scripts, switching to shells like zsh and things like zsh-autosuggestions or zsh-syntax-highlighting, colorls, a specific terminal emulator they use, and so on and so forth.
deleted by creator
-
On the one hand I agree.
I remember when I first learned about Linux, specifically an early version of KNOPPIX. Computers ran Windows. Mac whatever existed but was niche. The idea that I could boot a new fully functional OS from a CD was an absolutely crazy idea. I thought I had an understanding of computers but this changed everything.
This rant talks about users being unwilling to branch out but I think it’s more that they’re unable to. They lack the understanding of what question to ask. They’re not making the choice to not try Foo, they lack the understanding that alternatives exist. If someone told you “Actually cars don’t need wheels” and then took the wheels off and drove away you’d be completely flabbergasted. Turns out cars move based on magic not wheels.
On the other hand.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for folks to be a little more attentive in the choices they make. When you buy a car you don’t just show up to the dealership and grab the first one you see. You choose gas, electric or hybrid. You choose a car, a truck, a van, etc based on your needs. You might pick a specific brand/make/model based on other requirements.
It’s fine to choose the most popular option, it’s popular for a reason, but you should understand a little bit about your choice. You chose Lenovo. You chose Windows. You chose Edge. You chose Bing.
I’m not asking if you know if you have an HDD or an SSD. I’m not asking if it’s an NVME drive. I’m not asking which generation/model CPU it has.
I think the frustration being expressed is the type you see from the classic “The Website is Down”.
i mostly agree with you. But:
the drivers should at least be able to change a flat tire no?
Same with computer users, they should at least be able to change their software (if the company doesn’t lock them down that is). But they can’t even do that.
Below is basically just a rant disguised as an argument you may or may not ignore it
I have friends, family and colleagues that cannot grasp things such as the existence of other OS’s besides windows, android and macos/ios and that there is other software than they know.
For example, my friends say stuff like “have you cracked/hacked your phone/pc again?” Because i use linux and lineageOS instead of windows/macos and android/ios. No matter what i tell them. They don’t care that it took like 10 minutes to do. they don’t care that it is basically 4 steps. The fact that i use something different to them makes them think that i am a computer genius even tho i know jack shit.
I do not blame them as they have only known one way/thing their whole life. But i blame the people that are responsible for them only knowing one thing.
What i wanted to say with this whole ass bible is: they don’t have to know everything. But they should know something so that they are not helpless when things go south
Nice, I made a wokrshop about that earlier this year for RightsCon :
"Can you host the metaverse? How learned helplessness from Big Tech made you believe you can’t
BigTech seems expensive, complex, secure, new and basically the only way to use any modern tool. This is a blatant lie, repeated daily and orchestrated to limit emerging technology to very few for-profit corporations. Being a repeated lie is a problem because instead of at least trying to challenge the status quo we, all of us, can assume it is true and give up on trying, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Before digging into the technical aspects it is important to first prove it by running a short experiment then, only after, question how lie made us collectively and individually impotent. Learned helplessness itself will be used to identify extremely difficult situations most of us did encounter and might still encounter in the present.
This session will invite participants to simply try what is the state of the art of BigTech marketing at the moment, namely “the metaverse”, and show that behind the abstract concept there is a technical reality that is not that complex and definitely not unachievable, even for a independent person with a very limited budget.
The workshop itself will rely on self-hosted open-source tools in order to both communicate and capture lessons learned, demonstrating by its own execution that synchronization and exploration of such a topic is possible today. "
If people here are interested I can record it again in a presentation format.
Is your workshop is more for tech-oriented people or more for lay audience?
It’s for everyone. People who are tech oriented can dig deeper by implementing or modifying what I suggest but overall anybody can understand the problems, see that solutions are available and what a next step could be. I would say it’s for people who want to do better with tech regardless of their current knowledge.
Edit: I give weekend workshops for 11-12 years old kid so I believe the material is rather accessible but always happy to hear suggestions to do better!
Yes, please. Missed RightsCon this year.
I’m interested in this as well.
Please do - it seems it was not recorded on the AccessNow’s YouTube account
Weird company to target, these days I feel like Windows PC users are on average far on the “knowledgeable” side of the spectrum, not as far as Unix system users of course.
Apple and mobile OS users are the ones who know nothing about their system.
Yeah like at least windows gives you an error code, Macs basically just say “uh-oh, we did a fucky wucky and your device has failed, contact apple” and now your stuck searching up the exact text and trouble shooting a dozen potential issues and dozens more potential fixes.
Good argument. I definitely read that.👍
Why have we posted a massive wall of text as a picture?
Apple does more than M$.
Apple is just as bad in a different way. There is no perfect solution. People need to understand what they do, to do it well. That doesn’t mean that the average Joe needs to learn C. He can continue to write down the process on some sticky notes but it would help if he does look beyond the horizon e g. understand what the buttons he clicks all day actually do.
The average Joe should know how to use the command line. No, awk and sed aren’t needed at that level.
So tech support over the phone is a bit more bearable.
I can’t relate at all to the GUI hate. A GUI you can explore. “What does this button do?” “What changes when I enter a value here?”
How does that compare to a command prompt? How would you even start guessing commands?
You can explore a GUI if it’s safe to do so. If a user has been burned by easily putting their system into an unrecoverable state, they develop a fear of exploring. “I don’t want to change anything; I might break my computer / lose all my work / get a virus!” is a really common fear.
That’s an argument against bad GUI design [Edit:, not GUIs in general]. This can just as easily (if not more easily) happen in CLIs, where a single typo can fuck you up.
deltree c:\
Not to say this is gospel truth or anything. It’s just why I virtually always prefer a command line over a GUI. (Within reason.)
- GUIs almost always hides/obfuscates/abstracts things that are going on under the hood in a way that text doesn’t.
- Anything I can do from a Bash terminal, I can automate pretty trivially. (Or even just press “up” and then “enter” to quickly redo it a second time.)
- Pointing devices feel awkward and imprecise for a lot of operations. Pretty great for FPSs. Sometimes a necessary evil for image editing. Slow and sucky for setting a boolean value or putting your text cursor between two specific characters in a paragraph of text.
- It’s good to be able to use a terminal when your GUI’s broken or frozen. Ctrl+alt+f2 or if even that doesn’t work, ssh in from another box (or your phone).
- It’s a lot easier to paste a Bash one-liner into a chat or text file than describe a series of mouse clicks.
- You learn a lot using Bash that you don’t learn using GUIs. And that can come in handy.
“Guessing commands” isn’t the way to go about it. Read the man pages. Read the help for commands. Read a tutorial or some examples.
That’s exactly my point. You can’t explore a CLI. You need to rely on external resource to first learn how to use it. That’s just not something you can ask of people who want to use computers as tools. When’s the last time you read your car manual?
Info pages, help and manuals are built into the system and commands. You don’t have to leave the shell to read anything. I’ve also explored it just by pressing a letter or two and then autocomplete. But you realize that average people need help to figure out a GUI too, right?
A car manual is more comparable to learning how to drive in the first place. And yes, sometimes I’ve consulted the manual to figure out what lights mean or how controls work.
Sure you can explore a CLI. It’s not unlike playing Zork. You can try something, read the response, and try something else. That’s how I learned the CLI outside of specific command attributes
that’s just extra friction, with UIs you can explore and figure out at a glance roughly what a button will do
That greatly depends on the button’s label
It’s possible to do amazing things with a CLI in seconds that would be minutes of clicking with a GUI - that’s why they still exist. And sure, it’s tuned towards people who would be “how about I write a Python program to handle this”.
$ command -h $ command --help $ man commandI have a lot of tab completions installed, too, so i can also just hit tab to get a list of all possible options, etc.
You’re already assuming that
commandis a valid command. That’s an invalid assumption for an unitiated user. On the other hand, a first-time user can click on icons, or hover over them to find the tool tip. (That name in itself suggests that the GUI should be explored rather than taught.)That would be similar to saying you are assuming the user has opened the gui application, not just randomly clicking the desktop.
Of course I’m assuming they already know what application they want to use before exploring its capabilities.
The core problem is education and bad UX. People are taught how to do specific things (click here, type this word, press this button) without ever being told why. And the bad UX discourages exploration of different ways of doing things. So it never occurs to them that there might be a better way.
Personally, I think it’s ok for people to not have a deep understanding of their computer, but if you use one for hours every day, it makes sense that you know how to use it. Just like I don’t expect a driver to know how to take apart an engine but they should know how to change a flat or put in coolant.
know how to change a flat or put in coolant.
Even just “The tire is the thing that has broken, I see tire flat: should round”, or “Coolant is to combat hot. I have the hot. Is coolant ok?”
they should know how to change a flat or put in coolant
and care design, just like ux, is evolving in a way where the service industry takes the role of the user in maintaining their tools
I haven’t read all the comments yet so forgive me if I’m repeating this.
This is not specific to Windows or Microsoft. There’s been a general dumbing down and more hand holding going on for decades now.
People don’t need to think for themselves more and more. A huge amount of technology and information dessert is allowing people to become increasingly stupid.
Driving for example, many would assume that technology like lane assist is there to keep people safe from mistakes. Which it is, certainly. But only because people are becoming lazier drivers.
It’s not so much a chicken or egg issue as a horrible feedback loop of stupidity or downward spiral into dumbness.
I honestly worry for the human race with how increasingly lazy and idiotic we are collectively becoming.
At this rate, we don’t have to worry about robots, aliens or AI obliterating us, we’ll be too dense to recognise it and welcome our extinction with open arms and apathy.
A lot of people in Linux subs seem to be ready and willing to unload their “everything is dumbed down” opinion, with all the ferver of a solider heading out to war. I’m a long time computer user, programmer and hacker, so I understand these points of view, but they come across as very gate-keepy around the idea of using a computer at all. Like… I think it’s obscene that so many people would think you need to learn how to use the command-line in order to use a computer.
You guys have it wrong, I love smart GUIs that mean I don’t have to spend my life writing complex command line statements, why are there so many people trying to hold back the wonder and marvel of computers from people who haven’t spent their entire lives dedicated to learning about the computer? I mean seriously, I don’t expect any of my friends or family to be as experienced at these things as I am, and that’s okay. I want the computer to be an easy thing to use. Hell, I want the computer to be easy to use so that I can apply my skills to building things on the computer and have people pay money for them, I think that’s a fairly reasonable trade.
Death rate per 100,000,000 miles has been dropping a lot over time.
In 1923, when it first started being tracked, it was standing at 21.65. 1970, it was 4.88. 1990, 2.21. In 2021, it was 1.5.
It spiked recently, though, a tiny bit around 2015-2016 but then greatly in 2021. In 2014, the rate was 1.17.
I do agree that the self-driving features are kinda pointless, especially right now, though. GM has gotten especially bad with their marketing, showing ads with people intentionally taking their hands off the wheel and not paying attention to the road while the car’s moving.
The death rate is dropping yes, because of things like seat belts, air bags and better structural safety features of cars. But if you look at the crash rate and rate of driver error, it’s increased and is continuing to increase. Injury and crashes from driver distraction had a massive increase with the advent of smart phones.
“If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you’ll end up with a more complex system” - Aaron Griffin
I work with a lot of Windows admins who have to move over to Linux, and this post is extremely accurate. One additional thing I’ve noticed is that because Windows error messages are terrible the users have learned to simply ignore them as there’s no useful information. Getting them to stop and read what’s in front of them is one of the hardest things to do.
Having learned how to use computers via MS-DOS, then growing to mostly use Windows machines, and then moving to daily-drive Linux in the past handful of years, I think the problem is more about context. If I see an error message, it’s not that I don’t read them. Rather, if I lack the context to understand what it is trying to tell me—and more importantly, what I can do to resolve the problem I’m having, I’m out of luck and I’d have to ignore it.
It was when I switched to using Linux that I’ve picked up the habit of searching the error message online, and then browsing the various pages (mostly Stackoverflow, sometimes Arch Linux wiki pages) which might or might not lead me to the context behind the error message. If I get lucky, I could find a clue to resolving my problem on top of understanding what the error message is about. Other times, I end up being even more confused and give up.
And then there’s the monstrosity that is the logs. I’m pretty much illiterate when it comes to them, and reading them might as well be reading arcane records of eldritch daemons keeping my machine working (in a way, they indeed are). Copy-pasting some snippets from them into an online search is a crapshoot. I may find something that fits my context, but a lot of times, it’s for a different problem. It might not even be for my OS/distro/package/version.
deleted by creator
