They’re in their 60’s, finally convinced them.
They say things like “This is the same…”
and I’m like
“Ya because that’s Firefox, the only program you use…”
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Providing minimal malware protection while being actual malware?
I can’t believe Microsoft is doing EEE on malware
“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.
whatismypurpose
yourunfirefox
Windows is just the micro kernel running the actual operating system: Firefox.
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!
This is the year of Firefox-on-the-desktop. I can feel it.
This is the year of Firefox-on-the-desktop. I can feel it.
FoxOS - coming soon?
Mozilla FirefOS?
missed opportunity to say Mozilla FireFOSS
Different meaning, though!
That is the most delicious flavor of that pasta I’ve ever read.
When I was at Qualcomm we had an experimental, internally developed mobile OS that embraced the ubiquity of the browser and the power of apps written for the browser. The code name was b2f, which stood for “boot to Firefox”
I posted this xkcd a couple of weeks ago, it’s always relevant!
You can probably add an iPad and an Android tablet there too.
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 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.
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.
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.
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…
Do you have a top 5 list of things you hated?
I don’t have a “top 5”, but the main thing was outdated software. I went to Debian because I wanted “stability” and heard that it was good, but it ended up meaning the “15-minute bugs” I encountered weren’t fixed for basically the whole year I used it, all the apps looked like they were made in 2007, and if it weren’t for Linux forums I would never have known that there were more “modern” Linux apps, and I would have been left believing Linux development basically died