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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
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
Are we sure this is zoomers being less tech literate, and not just being a common issue, but used in a way to shit on the next generation? I dealt with the same shit in highschool with other millennials, so this feels so much like those “Millennials are killing X” articles by out of touch boomers writing clickbait.
Working IT for close to 2 decades , I’m not convinced the users are getting dumber, as they’ve always been dumb af about technology. Maybe it’s because I’m out of end user support and don’t have to deal with modern stupidity, but talking to my support staff I don’t hear anything that I haven’t facepalms through my skull about before.
The rank-and-file “I’m not a computer person” users are more or less unchanged and you won’t see much difference there.
What’s happening is that you have this huge swathe of people who are technically “familiar with computers” but still have no idea how they work because the details are obfuscated or hidden in most modern systems.
You won’t see the difference in support. You’re most likely to see the difference in teaching, especially in areas that attract people who have an interest in technology.
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.
Windows users will say this and then call you slurs when you even suggest other options exist
This is what trying to emulate Apple does to you. Fuck Windows 11.
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.
Obligatory “switch to Linux” comment.
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.
I got write access once to that folder, but I never found a way to do it without breaking EVERYTHING connected to the Windows store lol Photos app - borked, fucking Calculator - borked, random settings panels - borked, Game Pass - borked
I was eventually able to put Humpty back together again without reinstalling windows, but it never was quite right until I did. It was not a pleasant experience lmfao
Microsoft onedrive, 365 integration, teams and all of that is the most frustrating experience I’ve had with a computer in a very very very long time.
It’s infuriating to try and save something. I have no fucking clue where it’s going to go. There’s like a one drive directory structure that’s exactly the same as the local one, but also sometimes it just saves it in some temp directory or weird onedrive area??
No worries, I’ll just open file explorer and it will be in the “recent files list”, right? Just kidding." Fuck yourself, I’m windows and that file doesn’t count as a recent file for some reason. Good luck finding it!"
You want to just save locally? Just change a setting buried deep in the menus. But fun surprise, this turns off cloud sync for all files–even ones that were shared to you for review. You have to manually pull updates and push yours. Can you guess what happens next? Overwrite party! Those figures Janet added to the doc just got over written when you synced your edits to a paragraph 4 pages away.
Oh and teams is another variable in the mix with a weird SharePoint backend (I think, who fucking knows anymore). It defaults to opening in a dumb teams WebView which is like the browser view of the stuff but somehow worse than that. You can change it to default to opening in the actual application, but see the syncing issues above(all because you want new docs saved locally and never on fucking one drive)
I’m like a god damned boomer with MS software these days. I hate every second working with it. Its always in the way.
The whole experience is user hostile.
Windows 7 was peak. Everything after that has been getting worse and worse every iteration.
I just set up VFIO. I remember it being a total pain in the ass a few years ago, so I was expecting to spend a whole week debugging and tweaking. But, it was surprisingly easy. In just a couple hours I’ve got a windows 11 VM with it’s own dedicated GPU up and running. And the next question that popped into my mind, that I’m yet to solve, is, “What now? What did I just do it for?”. All the games I wanted to play now work on wine/proton, some even went out of their way to not work in a VM specifically. Yes, there are a couple pieces of
shitsoftware that I need windows for, but I’d rather keep trying and testing open source alternatives, maybe even participate in their development to the best of my ability, rather than maintaining a VM just for them.god i love linux. Shit just fucking breaks, doesn’t tell you, leaves you confused, until you go and find out why. Dont want an application? Great, it didn’t install to begin with, or you can just remove that shit.
Problem? Try something else. There’s something you’ll like eventually. I much prefer being treated as a schizo, to being treated like im a fucking deranged psychopath who likes floating windows, and nested settings menus for some reason. Please, take away my window arrangement freedoms, and give me something that does more, with less. I love it. It’s great. You want to know the best part? If you don’t want that, you just don’t have to use it. Truly an incredible platform.
I haven’t bought a new car since 2004. How fucked am I when I need a new one?
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.
Well, you wouldn’t buy a 10 year old used laptop,
IBM thinkpads and Linux bros disagree.
