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Finally did it, got my parent on linux.
(lemmy.world)
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Beautiful 🥲
Did the same thing. Got them using FOSS apps on Windows (Firefox, LibreOffice, Thunderbird), then switched them and made Linux look like Windows. They never cared, kept on using it like nothing changed.
This sounds about right. My parents only use their browsers. They literally do not use any applications outside of the browser. They would be just fine on Linux but change is scary and everything just works.
They’re in their 60s*
But lovely story ❤️
Windows is just the micro kernel running the actual operating system: Firefox.
Or more likely, Chrome browser these days......
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!
That is the most delicious flavor of that pasta I've ever read.
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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.
Wha-
People in the middle! Crushed yet again, oof!
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…)
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Yeah my grandma uses it without any problems. I would never recommend it to my sister or mom but i know my grandma is completely happy with her basically chromebook.
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"What was Windows even doing for us?"
Providing minimal malware protection while being actual malware?
As a retired software dev, for me Windows is simply a longtime habit enforced by past work environments. I did use Linux for over a year on my main PC but went back to Windows so I could keep using my old copy of Visual Studio. My deeply conditioned shortcut keystrokes didn't work in VSCode - in fact, why did they change so much of the UI? But now that I'm used to VSCode, which I only use for hobby coding anyway, there's no excuse and I intend to go back to Linux by year end.
VS Code is an electron app, mostly likely coded by some flavour of Javascript developers, so I doubt it was ever planned to go in the same direction as Visual Studio. VS Code follows a design very close to what Sublime made popular.
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whatismypurpose
yourunfirefox
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 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 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/
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.
What country is this?
What, in 2024, makes you think anyone's environment is relegated to any one country? But if you must know, it's a large part of the US, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Mozambique, and about 15 other countries. There are some very technically skilled folks between 25 - 35 years old, but the percentage of that group pales in comparison.
You might be misunderstanding what I’m saying. I haven’t said that there aren’t any in the 40+ crowd that are tech savvy, just the overwhelming majority arent.
It’s not me who’s just spouting this, I’m paraphrasing a study that was done that found these results:
I did read the study before responding. You are talking about the abilities for computer use for age ranges. The study talks about the range between 16 and 65 years old, yet does not segregate into shorter age ranges, it generalizes in that broad range. However, you do mention smaller age ranges, and I countered that, in my experience, your assessment is inaccurate.
I said we live in different realities because:
- You never mentioned a specific country
- My experience iscludes a very broad group of countries (albeit not the 100+ the OECD covers)
I'll go even further. My kids (9 and 11 years old) are better trained to use anything thrown at them regardless of UX, because I take the time to take them through logic and common sense exercises with different systems regularly, which is way more than can be said about the upcoming generation. Kids today are being taught to "do this always" for any step instead of pushing them to figure out how to work out stuff. This creates a train of thought that's detrimental to them because their brains will get use to "this is how it's done", effectively blocking the "and what happens if I do this instead?". Does that make sense?
However, people from my generation, who started becoming adults when computers (regardless of OS or brand/manufacturer) were just becoming mainstream in households and workplaces, we had to adapt to how things worked as they evolved with little to no help. This is what allowed us to still be able to keep up with anything that shows up new, all the evolution of software and hardware over the years, and the new technologies.
I am all too aware that there are some seriously skilled and smart younger individuals out there. These are curious and risk-taking people that are always hungry for knowledge. I know quite a few people like this, but this, unfortunately, is not the norm, again in my experience. Similarly, there's a bunch of people from my generation that just learned the basics to be able to go about their day, and never learned how to change a freaking DNS address in their device.
Having said that, my response to your original comment remains, based on my first hand experience on how skills across age ranges differ in a generalized context over many different countries and cultures.
You keep referencing your own personal tech adeptness as some sort of gotcha against what the study found. This is exactly what they say. People well-versed in tech greatly overestimate the general public’s tech abilities.
You are in your own bubble. Your kids are good at tech because YOU are good at tech. Just peruse through your posting history. You’re posting about hacker conferences and running local Joplin services. You are NOT the average tech consumer. Congratulations on being surrounded by like minded peers. You are not the average.
The findings of the study went absolutely over your head. You’re clearly very tied to your personal experience and cannot see outside of it so any more interaction or discussion would be a waste of both of our times. Take care.
You're correct, the older I get, the less I care about things outside my circle, but the fact remains, that study you are pushing does not segregate the age range. They talk about the broader 16-65 years old, and you reference the segregation based on your personal experience teaching those age ranges you point out.
Now, out of curiosity, how is that different from what I'm doing?
You may be right, someone here is arguing for the sake of it.
You have a great day too, buddy.
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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.
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I got my parents in their 70s to use Ubuntu for a few years now. All they use is a web browser and word processing application for .docx files. They used MS Word for years and I found Only Office has a similar UI and opens word docs.
At one point I gave them an older laptop running windows again and they hated it. They wanted Linux back.
Libreoffice has an option for a ribbon user interface. It makes it nearly identical to Microsoft's stuff that I grew up on.
Onlyoffice is a near clone of MS office though, so there's basically no friction in adopting it unless you're heavily into advanced Excel features.
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I had my mom on Ubuntu for most of the 2010's, and then the macbook it was on had catastrophic hard drive failure around the pandemic, but then I was like, you don't work anymore, why exactly do you NEED a computer to begin with? So now she literally doesn't have a computer and just lives mobile/tablet OS life, which in a nonprofessional context seems perfectly serviceable these days.
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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