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Unfortunately the tech literate of us are in the minority.
Almost all consumer tech is targeted to the lowest common denominator which is either Dorris, the 68 year old lady from you legal department who prints off emails to read them. Or Jessylyn the Zoomer thats only ever used an iPhone and cant learn anything that take longer than 10 seconds to teach.
This has me wondering, are young people actually getting LESS pc literate? I’m sure there’s studies about that? It’s never occurred to me that growing up with computers but without smartphones was peak conditions for becoming tech literate.
Yes. They don’t even know where to find files during their college classes
Can confirm this. I teach a programming class and about two years ago my brain exploded when I was helping a student debug a problem said “o, you tried to reference the file but it’s actually up one directory and inside another one so you’ll need to include the full (relative) path”
The blank look of “what the hell are you talking about” threw me for a loop. So, then we talked about file systems for awhile…
I’ve done support for sysadmins and I’ve run into a lot of them who don’t understand the concept of relative or absolute paths. A couple weeks ago I had to explain how password hashing works to people working for a huge aerospace company.
I think most people learn to use computers like they learn to use a car, in that they understand the rituals they need to perform to get it to do the thing they want. They lack understanding of what’s going on under the hood so when something goes wrong they can’t fall back on knowledge and figure out what went wrong, they have to learn an entirely new routine to fix it instead of learning the principles and thinking critically.
I remember there was a folder for a Windows marketplace game that I spent a good couple of days trying to get rights to access so I could mod the single player game contained inside. But no, Microsoft had a folder on MY OWN computer locked down tougher than Fort Knox. That was Windows 10 iirc, I can’t imagine how much worse it’s gotten, I switched to Linux completely a couple years back.
Windows 7 was peak. Everything after that has been getting worse and worse every iteration.
Bought new laptop recently as in the op picture and OneDrive ‘integration’ was the final straw for me. I used windows since 3.11 and whilst there’s some stuff I don’t like about Linux I had enough reasons to make a switch after few hours of worrying where the fuck my files went.
I haven’t bought a new car since 2004. How fucked am I when I need a new one?
Very
Well, you wouldn’t buy a 10 year old used laptop, but I drive my second 06 Forester, almost 20 years old.
But for a new car, fucked.
My Thinkpad collection scoffs at your presumptions.
Well, you wouldn’t buy a 10 year old used laptop,
IBM thinkpads and Linux bros disagree.
MacBook Pro + Linux as well.
Obligatory “switch to Linux” comment.
I had that problem and that solution did resolve it.
Unfortunately it made me the weird lady at the bar recommending people try operating systems
Hey weird lady, what would you recommend?
I like Garuda but you should probably try something more stable. Plasma 6 is nice though.
Do your research and focus on your priorities. That said I think neon is probably what I’d recommend to my wife
“What’ll you have to drink?”
“I use arch, btw”Just give me the hops, yeast, and water and I’ll compile it myself.
Yes I use arch, how did you know
Separately from that, it drives me mad how warped the idea of “consent” is in Windows (and in tech in general). “Later” is not the opposite of “Yes” goddammit!
Imagine sexual consent was similarly warped: Hey Becky, you wanna have sex? You can only answer “Yes, right now!” or “Maybe later,” and I’ll keep asking you FOREVER. So, what will it be?
Windows does give off the vibes of the type of person who does that tbh. See: “I see you’ve been interacting with me in the ways you generally have to, have you considered interacting with me in these ways? Oh you know that competitor isn’t nearly as good as I am, look at all the ways I copied them”
Maybe later
Gosh trying to find the Open PDFs by default using anything other than Edge was a HUGE pain at work where I have to use Microsoft Shit…
It’s nowhere in the settings, Edge straight up ignores the fact you set up a different PDF viewer app as a default, which takes way longer to load files than my other installed PDF readers.
You have to right click and have this option checked, smdh.
i uninstalled edge. that solved most of my edge related problems.
My favorite was when my new Windows 11 laptop started automatically backing up my files to OneDrive without telling me, then STOPPED LETTING ME SEND AND RECEIVE EMAILS because my OneDrive was full. Full of stuff that I never wanted to back up.
So one of my main email accounts, which I’ve used within the free tier limits for 20ish years, suddenly went dark because I signed into Windows.
Of course while investigating, the UI offered helpful options like:
- Pay for more cloud storage
(Not depicted: “Free up some space,” “Disable backups”)
Epilogue: After several rounds of disabling backups, then deleting the stuff in OneDrive, then Windows deciding that I couldn’t have wanted that and backing all my stuff up again anyway, I finally fixed it by deleting some key directories so the backup would just fail.
You can fix it by never logging on with an email address.
Thing is, installing win11 without linking a Microsoft account is still a rather large pain in the ass. 1000% worth it minf you, but they really don’t want you to.
I just did it this morning, when you burn the ISO to a usb drive using Rufus you get a nice little menu that allows you to pre-set a local account, disable the TPM check and more.
The biggest pain is downloading the windows 11 iso in the first place. You can only do that when the site believes you’re not already using windows.
Bypassing the online check on setup is basically required on new hardware anyways, since most 2.5g/wifi6+ networking drivers aren’t included in the installer.
this is a feature of rufus, not of windows, while it’s really cool, go rep rufus, not windows. Especially for the linux users who don’t use windows and have to suffer through what is sometimes arbitrarily confusing. I will say, there is a script out there that works great for flashing windows isos under linux. Uses a grub intermediary layer to ensure consistent behavior i think? Idk, i used it once.
If you’re in a situation where you absolutely must use Windows, at the out-of-box screen ,Enter a fake email address and a fake password a few times, and once it fails to sign in it will give you the option of creating a local account. Sneaky, deceitful, and underhanded, sure, but at least it’s still possible.
i’ve already commented this, but just to get my point across properly here, it’s these kinds of comments that bother me. They reek of “too occupied with whether we could do it, rather than whether we should do it.”
It’s a neat trick, but completely fucking ignores the problem. It’s like a car shipping from the factory with a bunged transmission but everyone going “well you can just not use first gear” or “well, doing a swap is easy” and my favorite “just re-gear it with third party parts, these ones don’t explode” Like, yeah, you could. Nobody would be buying that car though. For some reason tech nerds have a masochistic relationship to this shit and i dont understand why.
