I started on Commodore (Vic20 that I don’t remember much, C64, and A500) mostly with a tiny bit of Atari and then was on Windows at home for decades (I tried installing Linux (Mandrake and Redhat) back when it fit on a floppy, but without a lot of success). I guess I’m too old and not neurotypical enough?
I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It’s not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.
Yeah, Apple computers are disproportionately common at tech conferences and meetups.
I’m a backend dev and the last 3 companies I’ve worked for are exclusively apple only. It feels, to me, like apple took over US tech startups. Obviously pretty poor sample size.
I’m pretty old an have been working in IT for almost 20 years now. Back in the day in would be more like this “hey welcome to the team, here’s your PC”. Someone would point to a desktop with Windows (XP) on it. If your company was “good” at IT you would have roaming profiles, so you could use any desktop with your own profile. If you would get a laptop (usually if you did IT consultancy that would be the case) it would be some locked down version of Windows where you would not even have admin rights.
In one of my first jobs a colleague (developer) couldn’t do his job because his pc was so slow and locked down. One day he came into the office with a CD-ROM that had Ubuntu on it. He just wiped the desktop and installed it. As a young office worker I was shocked! You can do that???
Yeah, we’re Apple only as well, but that’s largely because we didn’t want to deal w/ the BS of the corporate images, and they only support Windows. I could probably argue a case for Linux, but we’ve been on Apple for years, so that would be an uphill battle.
Well you have access to a lot of the same CLIs that Linux users get, right?
I’m not a fan, but I know a handful of professional developers who main apples.
No need for a study. Everyone knows apple is for fucktards.
You realize that not every user of a computer is a developer, right?
I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker…I don’t know crap about any of that. I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I’m guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.
Mixed messages here: “I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble.” Fellow human, those are the actions of a programming genius and hacker. The bar is remarkably low. A lot of people can’t even read what it says on the screen.
Peoples’ definition on programming is unclear.
I watched two people argue if Dennis Ritchie or Mark Zuckerberg is better at programming in comments on a youtube video about C.
And they are relatively tech-savy if they watch those videos.
It was VIsta for me!
But… I started on a BBC Micro.
Maybe I’m not up to date on my porn slang but “BBC micro” sounds like an inherent contradiction.
Get you and your modern luxuries!
Were your parents teachers?
We didn’t own a BBC Micro, my school did.
My modern luxury at home was one of these:
Was taught using Apple2 then Macs in Jr High.
I built my own PC in high school (late 90s), upgraded it through college, then switched back to Mac’s when they went Intel.
I can’t muddle through Ruby, Python, Perl, Php C/C++, Objective-C and Swift. But wrote Actionscript, JS, and HTML/CSS for a living for 15 years.
How you start doesn’t matter and Mac’s are still better than Chromebooks. They have Unix shells FFS.
Unix shells
Since macos X. Prior did not…
Yeah. But that’s since 2001. So 24 years of Unix. Pretty sure that covers most recent grads or new hires ;)
I started on BASIC Apple IIe (had the full numpad for playing math munchers faster!)
Then we had a system 6 Performa that later got upgraded to System 7 then even 8 before I was able to save for a PC (Pentium 3 333mhz) during my last year of high school.
Some people are just naturally computer savvy. My class and I were taught on how to use command prompt, but only few of us could get it. We just wanted to play Command and Conquer and DOTA, and leave the tweaking to the nerds.
Nah, I really don’t think anyone is naturally computer savvy. Computers are literally the furthest thing from nature in existence. Some children are given the freedom and/or encouragement to explore computers, and some aren’t. Giving a child an iPhone or an iPad as their first computer is the opposite of this, btw.
Edit: For the record, nobody I know who uses a terminal on a daily basis used it in class for the first time.
Yeah I think it’s less to do with intrinsic talent than motivation and sense of reward from engaging with technical problems.
I played education games on a Apple II in 1998; I was in the first grade.
VIC-20
Tbf installing linux is not that hard
Even arch was easy back in 2010 as long as you could read the guide.
Now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ been quite easy for like a decade at least
Two decades minimum, my first install was an Xubuntu live cd more than 20 years ago
Fairsies :3 I just said a decade cause that’s my first experience, and I couldn’t be bothered looking into when the install process was really simplified for a random lemmy comment lol
Yeah no fun.
Ikr? At least we still have LFS /j
Back in the day when installing Solaris and OpenBSD and such you had to specify in numerical values the number of sectors of hard disk space you wanted to format drives with. Shit is considerably easier now with modern UNIXy systems.
Back in what day? My first Linux was in the early 2000s, and even back then it wasn’t any more complicated than a Windows install.
When I installed Linux for the first time around that time frame, I had to write X configs (for XFree86, not X.org) by hand. And be sure to get your monitor timings exactly right or risk permanent damage, said the scary warning.
That was always ‘fun’. Trying to find things like the ‘front porch’ timings was an exercise in frustration at times. Then put it all together and try it, hoping it either worked, or at least didn’t go too badly. The ‘boiinng’ noise sone monitors would make was always a bit alarming.
I ended up soldering together an adapter to convert from VGA to a monitor that took separate red, green and blue inputs with a sync pulse on green. Working out the timings for that was interesting, but I doubt any other PC OS could have driven it.
Lemmites are old brah
my first linux install was on a 486 from a box of floppies we got at a computer convention in the late 90s. Back then you had to do all sorts of crazy setup steps like figuring out drive layouts and screen frequencies. It was craziness but when you’re 13 and want to tinker with computers that’s what you did.
Bah! Young’un! ;) Installing Slackware off of a stack of 5 1/4" floppies and trying to work out your harddrive’s geometry without switching the machine off to look at the label was a challenge. Doubly so if you were trying to dual boot.
The mid 1990s for me, OpenBSD came out in 1996 and Solaris was Solaris was like 1992. I was admiring a Solaris SPARC station back around 1997 that had a gnarly install if I remember correctly. It was on 3.5” floppies and I still have that SPARC station and the original Solaris OS sitting in the basement collecting dust. At one point that SPARC was being used by some of us working with the PHP group to diagnose file system limits on Solaris and build PHP binaries back when I was involved in PHP development. Fun times.
My first Linux install was like Red Hat 5.2 or something and it was much nicer.
Oh man. I remember Solaris. I tried to install that on something and never got it running.
It’s absolutely insane how much progress was made from 1995-2000.
“Do you want to install GRUB on /dev/sda?”
At 12 i would still have been too scared of breaking something, which I think is a reasonable fear, at the very least if you’re sharing a PC.
Me reinstalling windows for the 3rd time this year cause of some bsod:
- yes
- yes
- yes
- choose language
- partition
- log into forced account
- no to telemetry 20x
- sell your sole, give your personality up for theft to an aI and agree to never sue microsoft in their tos
- reboot
- find some guide on internet to follow step by step while I type commands into 20 different terminals, open 4 different control panels and use regedit to reduce the bloatware and spyware.
Me installing advanced user linux for the first time after previous process did not fix monster hunter from crashing:
- choose language
- partition
- launch linux for first time
- rpm fusion for nvidia drivers
- reboot
If I had known linux runs games better I would have switched years ago.
Ok so now you gotta help me figure something out
Im sort of a hoarder when it comes to my data - as in I don’t know what takes up 80% of my storage space but it does.
And I really want to switch to Linux, but the daunting task of finding where 8+ TB of data needs to go before I install it has slowed me down.
Actually 8TB isn’t that bad thinking about it. Maybe it’s just time to find anything I care about and just purge the rest, and start fresh?
I’d recommend Winderstat to figure out what’s causing the bloat
You are the luckiest motherfucker on earth if your 8tb of data is safe on the same drive as windows.
Id just start fresh. Most of the crap you don’t need. If you needed it youd know exactly what it is and would follow the backup law.
Oh it’s not on the same drive as windows. It’s just scattered amongst various SSDs
It doesn’t go anywhere. In the file explorer you can just open the disk and work with the contents. Linux can access ntfs drives.
You could detach them before installation, I did that with windows too in the past, to make sure they aren’t accidentally formatted during installation.
:O that’s amazing
When you’re on Linux, use czkawka to clean out your files. It searches for duplicates, big files, empty files, …
Also works on windows, if you want to clean first.
https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka
btw, you’re creating backups, right? A big disk 8TB is fairly inexpensive. Back it up before you do large file transactions.
… Yeah we’ll go with the idea that I’m creating backups
Been a PC/windows user and builder since the 2000s and as someone who doesn’t work in coding or tech. Linux confuses me
I’ve met people that struggle with the concept of shutting a computer down.
You are 100% underestimating the average non-techy
You are assuming they can’t when in reality it is more that this is learned helplessness, they have been told over and over that they wouldn’t understand anyway so they aren’t even trying.
Oh no, these very same people have been told time and time again they can.
It’s not a can’t, it’s a won’t.
Ah, the learned helplessness<->weaponized incompetence spectrum.
Don’t forget to park the hard drive before you power down.
Watching a millennial (around the same age as myself) simply turn off the monitor when I asked her to restart really put things into perspective for me.
I don’t take any knowledge for granted anymore, all my clients get step-by-step, stupid-proof instructions for even the simplest tasks.
When I dual booted Ubuntu about a decade ago it took an afternoon and needed a lot of extra command line stuff to do anything.
Last night I installed Linux mint and it took about two hours. Most of the time was me rebooting my ancient laptop though.
On a newer (less worn out) machine I could probably do it notably faster.
Funnily enough I’ve had the opposite experience: installing Linux on a 12 year old laptop: 30 mins and done, installing windows on the same laptop: 5 and a half hours
Easier than installing any other OS.
I recently had to make a bootable iso for windows for someone in my family and it was a way bigger pain than linux, so… not wrong lol
Never tried installing mac so can’t say how the experience of that is :3
You’re right. In fact, I think the easiest OS to install is probably some sort of Linux distro. But most people don’t install their OS. And Windows is shipped built-in on many computers (even though we’re starting to see some Linux options as well).
I grew up on Windows my entire life, but really only as a user until I got into teenagehood. I still remember when I was 12 and had to reinstall Windows 7, and I was given the option of either x64 or x86. I thought “Oh, my laptop is stupidly old, it’s gotta be the lower number” and it took an embarrassing amount of time to then actually try the x86 option which immediately worked.
I installed Slackware in ’96.
Things have most certainly changed.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point on.
I mean, I managed to fuck up my Windows 95 just by installing a couple of games. God knows how that happened.
I remember!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can’t remember what game it was, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers…
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it…basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
“Reinstall windows” was such a common solution, I still have my windows 95 and my windows XP key memorized (and no, not the FCKGW one)
And it always took so fucking long.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I’d add that PCs also had great gaming, which also encourages upgrading, and PCs have always offered more options for upgrading. You learn a lot and can break a lot doing that, both of which add to the experience.
I’ll always remember when I accidentally bent a CPU pin and had to manually straighten it with pliers… it was terrifying 😭 (but that CPU is still working perfectly in my computer 7 years later !)
Did she intentionally use the word disclude to make linux autists mad?
Looking at the comments, it occurs to me that we’re not a representative section of the online community.
Were literally people who went out of their way to not use a conventional/commercial tech product.
I wonder what the % of people on here is who have built a pc, used a raspberry pi or installed Linux compared to the outside world.
Considering linux, self hosting and open source gets mentioned in every community here… I’d say it’s a significant amount
A big reason I use Lemmy is because I like all the FOSS discussion lmao.
Yeah I totally don’t mind either, feels like I can say whatever I feel like here and people will understand what I’m saying
Well, Lemmy is kind of selfhosted itself, sooo…
I would bet the number is extremely high. I’ve done all these things.
Hah, the joke’s one you: some of us are too cheap for using a Raspberry Pi and instead use chinese Pi clones!
Beaglebone checking in! Although I have splurged for a hardware packet sniffer.
Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to get the proper ones shipped most times?
I also bet the % is very high.
I wouldn’t even consider myself especially techy compared to Lemmy, but I’ve done all of those things.
+1 though I feel like I’m more average when it comes techiness (if anyone feels very techy and qualified to host a survey, I’d be interested in average tech experiences here.)
it occurs to me that we’re not a representative section of the online community
This! I have been preaching this for years, both online and IRL with the IT techs I manage. Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
The vast majority of people just want to buy a computer in a box, and have it work mostly perfectly. Which windows and Mac’s do really really well. And yes, windows isnt perfect but neither is Linux. And for 95% of people the most demanding and complicated thing they’ll do is web browsing, and power users might do something wild like play games through steam or install an alternate browser.
And we havent even touched work computers yet, which is a whole other level of “I don’t care at all” from end users.
Remember people “Linux is amazing!” is meaningless to people who have never heard the acronym SSD let alone what it is or why it’s better than a HDD.
I like to compare it to sewing because I genuinely don’t care at all about it. But I hear people say “just thrift clothes and tailor them to you!” But that ignores two things.
- I genuinely can’t think of a whole lot of other leisure activities I’d want to do less than sewing and tailoring.
- I barely know how to sew a button or mend a rip. Do you think I know how to actually tailor something? Or what types of tools I need? Or how to use them?
Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
God I love this comic. I’ve used it hundreds of times since he’s posted it.
Once I realized that the comic was not actually about geochemistry, same. Took me way longer than I want to admit to put 2 and 2 together there
I just want to point out that I was somewhat tech literate in the 2000s. and The Mac OS still scared me.
I started on a Mac, and now I live as a nomadic caveman, never contacting the civilized world.
