My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.

  • @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    I would argue that’s actually a good thing for the average user. Computers and other personal electronics have become so reliable that you rarely have to delve into those tools as an average user. You can actually see the trend of simplification and everything but Windows - Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android are all immutable operating systems where user data and applications live separately from a read-only operating system partition. This is obviously not the case for all Linux distros but the point still stands.

    Working in IT, I’m glad to see that despite the move to immutability in the Linux world, I actually have access to more tools than I did on base Ubuntu. blendOS and NixOS allowing you to spin up an operating system of your choice in a container, pull down whatever programs you want, all without cluttering your system? It really is the best of both worlds. Plus I still need a rock solid system, Knowing that I will always be able to apply an update without anything breaking is a huge win for all users. Back to the original point, technology has become so reliable and easy to use that you feasibly can just open your browser every morning and leave it at that. No hassling with clearing cache or anything, it just works.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      I can partly agree with that, a normal user should never be forced to edit things regedit or device manager for instance.

      What I was talking about though was that many kids don’t seem to know the functions of the programs they actually use daily. It’s not just that they don’t know of default keyboard commands that have been used for decades, it’s that they, in my wife’s case, didn’t even know that there was a function built into the program to do a search on page.