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.
Can we stop throwing around “autistic” for anything? Have people actually ever met autistic kids? It as nothing to do about having uncommon interest, it imply much more things then that.
Autism is a spectrum. Some autistic people are able to function somewhat normally while others might need help all their life. The term is certainly over used but it’s possible to meet someone autistic without ever knowing it.
back in the 80’s, whole rooms of Apple Computers sat empty, all day, everyday. At all the different schools i went to as a child.
I assume it’s because none of the teachers wanted to learn them, it was real fucking shitty growing up surrounded by so many stupid fucks.
but now, soon, AI will be x1000000000⁷ better teachers. So at least the children will have an actual chance in this world, and so many of them won’t choose liberal arts as their course of studies. -all that time they were just disciplining the children
A home-built (from a set) one-board computer counts as what?
Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results
The Picard Maneuver, inciting violence once again, I see. tips fedora
Gotta get my kicks somehow
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 take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?
Disclude is a perfectly cromulent word.
Don’t unclude my vocabulary like that
I’m not unsinuating nothing.
Is Dragon 32 a Mac or Windows computer?
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.
In my experience kids who had iDevices don’t grow up to be tech literate but do have decently off parents.
I also grew up dirt poor and only had a webTV til I was like… 14. I’m way more tech literate than most it seems.
webTV
Wasn’t that pretty expensive? Or am I thinking of something different?
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.
Sounds like both of my laptops running KDE
Used to work in mobile phone sales at a 100% telco owned store, so when things went tits up for customers the licensed stores in our area would tell customers to come to our store as we had employee access that exceeded partner access. I had SO many variations of the apologetic conversation with an elderly person whose family assured them that the iPhone is the easiest thing ever to use. They were happy with a feature phone but had an iDevice shoved down their throat by family members because “they are so easy”. Oh and arranging a change of mind return on an iPhone is a fucking nightmare in Australian Telco land.
They are not the easiest most straightforward choice, unless you use your devices in the constrained manner Apple has decided you will use them. The multiple times I have been forced to use a Mac or an iPhone or IPad, I have found them slow, obtuse and they have an annoying habit of hiding information I want to see. Windows is not really any better, just different.
I kind of see it like any other preference, people assume that because they find something the best then everyone must agree with that take.
The automation features in macOS are fantastic. Search, filter, run scripts when a new file arrives in a folder, great GUIs for automation, services. It’s sooooo powerful and accessible. Search for menu items in every application from the keyboard. Change keyboard shortcuts for all menus in all applications. Python, ruby, zsh, bash, are all installed by default. The default image and PDF viewer Preview.app has great editing for PDF included.
If you want to get shit done, macOS is just excellent in so many ways.
I started with a windows computer and learned lots about troubleshooting windows. However once I started using a Mac, I actually made cool stuff with my computer like music, nice documents, fun automation, video, programming, and so on.
The indie software scene on macOS is also unmatched, I think. The apps made by Omni and Panic have no equivalent on Linux or Windows. Kaleidoscope.app is the best diff app on any platform.
I don’t have to troubleshoot my kid’s Speak and Spell either.
But you can circuit-bend that shit 🤘🤘
That’s a good thing. The device does one thing and does it well.
Listen I love the battery life on my m1 but it’s the first mac I’ve owned and “intuitive” is not the description I’d use for the ui. Is terminal and homebrew familiar sure, and for most things it does work. But then there are the real oddities in the ui. Like why does finder not show me my full file system by default? Why do I drag and drop when installing a new app, thats fucking stupid. Why are files in folders just placed where ever with no order? There should be a grid pattern that works by default so it doesn’t become so disorganized. Why does clicking into folders just add a divider in finder instead of actually opening the folder so that after a couple nested folders you can barely make out file names. If you have lived with that madness for all your life maybe it’s “intuitive” because you have gotten used to it but linux and windows are just miles ahead in ui intuitiveness when it comes to basic functionality like this.
Why do I drag and drop when installing a new app, thats fucking stupid.
That’s how all file copy operations are done. Apps are just a virtual file that you drag into the Applications folder. To uninstall it you simply delete the file. Done.
As far as folder organization goes, I like that MacOS leaves my files where I left them. There are options to sort files if you need to as well.
Apps are just a virtual file that you drag into the Applications folder. To uninstall it you simply delete the file. Done.
So like appimages…
I’ve used both since 2001. Windows default search is worse, dragging and dropping to your chosen install location seems to make just as much sense as choosing it in a pop up window, grid and sort by are both right click dialog options. I thought the argument against Mac software was a lack of options so now I’m going to ask why Windows doesn’t let you organize folders by vibes
I’ve used mac for 2 years now for work (despite my repeated requests for a linux laptop). I have all kinds of weird issues including screensaver taking up gigs of memory, login not working unless I click off my portrait and click back on it (with no other changes), and a bunch of other just weirdness. I can’t stand the thing.
I have an external Samsung SSD that my mac mini just refuses to keep indexed.
The solution to this is when I log in every day I have to go into the Mac system settings and tell finder to ignore my external drive, close system setting, then reopen systen setting and tell finder to no longer ignore the external drive. This is the only way to get it to reindex everything.
I need to do this everytime the mac mini wakes from sleep.
Yeah no fucking shot I would do this for more than a day before getting a new pc
OK, that is one thing I haven’t figured out yet. How to make persistent SMB mounts.
I haven’t used macs extensively in a few years but when I did it was fstab, just like linux
Every year I believe this more and more. I’ve always been lumped in with the tech crowd by anyone not tech-savvy, but in reality all my knowledge is from personal troubleshooting and very limited (I’m thinking of trying Linux and that’s gonna be like a whole ass event for me). I used to think that was dumb, but then I started working with more Gen Z…
They have zero idea how to troubleshoot anything. If the computer doesn’t do what they expect, it’s a full stop for some of them. I have “solved” so many IT problems by replugging a cable or just knowing the settings option exists. These aren’t stupid kids either, they’re in a tough industry and very capable otherwise. I think my generation was right place, right time to learn this stuff organically because shit just never worked quite right – apple was largely the outlier back then.
If you even know what an OS is you’re ahead of 70% of the population. Probably more.
Intuitive for very basic things, but if you want to do anything outside the norm or some ease of use things from other desktops, goodluck.
The first mainframe account I ever had was an nCube2 supercomputer. No timesharing or anything, the full power of a Unix system just waiting under your terminal session. Today I have the same CLI under the hood of my MBP because it runs on a Unix kernel. In terms of power tho, this laptop makes the supercomputer look like a toy. I wouldn’t call either one’s use case “very basic things.”
Them’s fightin’ words 'round these parts, buster.
(… i agree)
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.
Should’ve written “Mac PCs” just to mess with people.
When Apple moved to Intel CPU’s there was the creation of the Hackintosh. Which was running apple’s OS on any PC hardware you had around that happened to be compatible. If you thought finding Linux compatible hardware was rough…that was worse.
I’m aware, yes, and that’s what I was referring to. By that time it was basically the same hardware as any other computer, but with slightly different motherboards and with special proprietary firmware.
There’s also some irony in the fact that “PC” was once a trademark that became generic. Someone should do the “Is this xerox a Canon?” joke, but with computers.
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!
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!
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”.
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point on.
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.
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 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!
Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to get the proper ones shipped most times?
Beaglebone checking in! Although I have splurged for a hardware packet sniffer.
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
