may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

Other people have good answers already. Chiefly to ask questions and talk through your reasoning.

But also I’ve noticed the difficulty of interview questions varies wildly. Some places would give dynamic programming problems I’m terrible at. Others would give trivial "find the largest number in this array of integers, in python. Don’t worry about efficiency. " problems.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

I went back to windows for a few months on the newer desktop. I installed mint and discovered it had a lot of problems with the hardware. HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, and various downstream things didn’t work. I fixed some of it with help from forums and such, but eventually I went back to windows.

But a couple months later, I tried Pop!_OS and that has worked perfectly out of the box. No regrets.

I decided I was done with reddit. I never used apps so I just signed out of my account and never went back.

Fed up with Microsoft. I had a windows 10 computer they said couldn’t update to windows 11, and they said Recall was coming, so I said fuck it. Switched to mint, and now I’m trying pop!_os.

Way back like 10+ years ago I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I play a lot of video games and support was lacking. Wine, proton, and other tools have come a long way since then.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

Well, off the top of my head, while it would be nice to live in a world without espionage that’s not this one. I don’t think you could do very good spying if everyone knew who your spies were.

I’d heard of him but didn’t think about him often.

Workers should unite and tell management to get fucked.

Capriciously applied rules is a terrible system. We hold up ideals like “rule of law” and “democracy” but as soon as capital is involved it’s right back to “I am the law” and tyranny.

Maybe, but the bug report was it was showing them in the “wrong order” in the UI. I could look at the API response but then I need to map that to what’s displayed somehow. I think I used the dev tools to run js on the page to get the actual dates in one go (since that was in the dom), but that kind of sucks. A customer certainly isn’t going to do that. They see a bunch of stuff that all says “yesterday” or “two weeks ago” and they need to do extra work to get information that we went out of our way to hide.

At work I had a page with 50 “friendly” dates and I had to figure out with ones were wrong. They all said like “yesterday”. Hell. Could have hovered over each one and taken notes, I guess, but that would suck. Had to use the dev tools and do a lot more thinking than just looking at them.

I kind of despise relative time. You see a bunch of stuff that says “yesterday” but can’t tell exactly when without taking more actions. Just tell me the date time I’m not a child.

Many people are illiterate. How many of them are trying to run Linux, I don’t know.

They want to emphasize certain words, but don’t really have the confidence and writing skills to do so in other ways

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.

Some strikingly high percentage can’t complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).

Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind