Submitted 11 hours ago by ickplant@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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*Reads comments in thread*
I started with a pair of matchsticks and a trenchcoat that I got at Galipoli in WW1, using the Phosphorus I found in the Bosphorus to craft makeshift TI calculator based on specs I got via Fax from a Samurai. I ran slackware on my slacks until we defeated the Ottomans, but they unleashed their puppy linuxes on us, and we stood no chance.
honestly i think part of the reason i’m a computer tinkerer now is my formative years were spent trying to run specific minecraft launchers, n64 emulators and other stuff on the family mac
Yeah the mac or pc part doesn’t really matter if youre curious and like learning. You can do a lot with mac. However on the surface I would say its a little more simplified.
The majority of people I know who have major computer problems solve them by buying another computer
I’m not even that tech illiterate, but I almost did that… My laptop was being slow, and I still had like 4k€ in overtime hours that I could buy Hardware from at work (it’s a great deal because I neither have to pay VAT on the hardware nor income taxes on the money from the overtime), so I was like, eh, might as well get a new laptop.
So then I read up on what laptop brands are out there, found out about Framework, and when I excitedly told my electrical engineer husband about it he was like “You knooow that you can easily replace parts in any laptop, right?”
Well, I didn’t know that (just kinda assumed laptops were more like phones than they are like desktop PCs), so I ended up just ordering a new SSD and new RAM for my laptop. It’s back to being butter smooth, but I have a hunch that cleaning the dust from the fans while I was in there was a very large factor in that haha
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I used to work at a locally run computer store, and one of the biggest upgrades for most people was going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD. Made a night and day difference.
I see you used to have an HDD in there. That alone would’ve made it painfully slow in Windows especially, but even with Linux.
Now it should stay fast for longer.
Wow that’s an amazing amount of dust. I think that’s the most I have seen in a computer and my only source of laptop used to be old things from recycling centers
I mean, asterisk. Most laptops let you swap the storage and RAM and many let you swap the battery. Beyond that it usually gets difficult.
Framework let you swap everything, which is a major difference. But of course you pay for that privilege; modular design has its costs.
Still, good on you for getting a cheap upgrade. No need to throw away a perfectly good laptop if you can make it work fast again with a new SSD.
I’ve told those kind of people about how easily I could format/reinstall the OS, and they looked at me like some kind of lunatic witch doctor.
That’s why I will nab computers out of the trash if I see 'em. Most of them still have perfectly functional modern parts.
used Solaris at 11 Plays factorio
Yeah I might be autistic.
Got a free Ubuntu CD shipped at ~14
Can’t socialize
Factorio
I’m cooked.
my dad had a copy of solais as he works in IT and has for about 40 years. i was like “what is this solaris thing” and installed it and was like “Wow what the fuck did i just find”. asked my dad about it and he said some of the servers they used ran solaris so that’s why he had it as when his company used to have server farms he would flash them with solaris or win server. most of my interest in computers comes from my dad working in IT/Telecom and bringing home servers and watching his laptop with all the stuff he would do.
I started on a commodore 64, you kids that started on a machine with a gui were coddled.
C64 gang, represent!
Seriously though, I feel like that generation of machines was the last time you could look at hardware and say “yeah, I understand literally everything about how this works” and that knowledge has made even some of my (tech sector) coworkers think I’m a wizard
I can technically claim I started with a hand me down C64 from my grandmother in the early 90s. But I was like 6 years old, and I didn’t really get into computers until we got a Windows 95 machine a couple of years later. Though by 99-2000 I was regularly playing around with the C64 for the novelty of what felt like ancient tech.
Vic-20 here. What a time to be alive.
TRS-80 then IBM PCjr here. Both hand-me-downs though.
Mom wouldn’t let me on the 386 until I could touch-type and write a program in BASIC. She was a Cobol and IBM RPG programmer.
Yeah, it was just MSDOS. I saw “Abort, retry, fail” so many times, and I didn’t even know what it meant because I was four and I just wanted to play Family Feud with my brother.
I had a GUI - windows 3.11
But it was so slow. So I made my own gui/menu system that ran in dos. I was between 9-11 I reckon.
Not sure where that lands me on the spectrum of coddledness
I think the issue is not having a desktop-type computer at all and having a tablet/phone that’s so locked down the kid isn’t given the opportunity to explore or troubleshoot.
Tinkering is how you learn to solve problems, which requires having something tinker-able without having to go down a hacky rabbithole.
I know a bit about teaching about computers/programming to kids in the first years of high school. Their understanding of anything computer is abysmal. They have grown up with smartphones and maybe tablet, never were able to tinker with anything. Even just what internet is was confusing to them. It had to be reframed as “when can you watch youtube” for it to make sense…
Anytime this topic comes up, I reshare this blog post. With things being “that bad” over a decade ago, I can’t imagine how much worse it’s gotten.
Like kids back in the 1980s ☺️ many couldn’t even read a floppy on the C64!
I wonder if they, I mean today’s kids, learn other things we miss out on.
I think the issue is not having a desktop-type computer at all and having a tablet/phone that’s so locked down the kid isn’t given the opportunity to explore or troubleshoot
True. That being said, I’m pretty sure that a Mac is roughly at the middle point between that and a Windows PC, with Linux users being way more tech savvy still.
In fact, the fact that so much exploration and troubleshooting is REQUIRED to make most if not all Linux distros do what you want is (along with game compatibility/availability) the main reason for many people who are sick of Windows to be hesitant to make the switch, myself included.
You don’t really need to tinker too much tbf, install distros like Bazzite and you have all done pratically
Witnessed a radiology resident typing her password into a computer and for each uppercase letter she would press shift-lock, type the letter, then press shift-lock again.
I couldn’t figure it out until my mom pointed out she probably only ever used a phone or tablet.
Which is crazy, because I can’t imagine getting through high school, college, and medical school without ever working on a desktop computer.
Exactly.
A background of tinkering with stuff without fear of the consequences of breaking it (which is a common mindset mainly amongst kids and teens) is the difference between a tool-maker and a tool-user, IMHO, and thinkering is far more natural to start doing and to do much further with an open system than with a closed system.
At 7yo my family got our first home computer. I had no idea how to use it properly, so I was constantly bricking OS on it which lead my father to constantly call in his friend to fix our computer. I bet constant ass whooping made me quickly learn how to undo my own mess. At 10yo I could reinstall win98 though floppy with NC
Hey, this is how I learned the ins and outs of W95 / XP . Oops, bricked the main (and only) PC again, better fix that before parent finds out. Now where is that install CD?
I started with windows 95, although we had a monochrome pc someone gave us, but couldn’t do much with it. Used floppy floppies, the big ones.
I was ecstatic when we finally got a real pc, with 16bit colors!
Hot take: macOS, being Unix like, fosters more tech literacy than Windows.
It’s much better now with windows terminal and winget, but a decade or so ago even basic things like installing python and adding it to PATH were infinitely easier on Unix-like environments.
For those privileged to have programming classes, the first 2-3 sessions were the teachers going round doing tech support just to install python on shitty locked down Windows laptops.
Windows being terrible makes you learn a lot of stuff, but so much of it is untransferrable.
I started with DOS. then windows. I didn’t use Linux until I was in my 20s, and not heavily use it until my 30s.
I just started using a Mac for work because it’s “Unix like”.
Mac’s are fucked up man. I don’t know how anyone gets shit done on them. the UX is developed like it’s for stroke victims with permanent brain damage.
I would rather use W11 than a Mac and a fucking loathe Microsoft and their horrible AI bullshit.
This. So freaking much this.
Mac is unix in the same way that Android is unix or my car’s infotainment system is Unix.
Yes, there’s unix under the hood, but there’s such a bunch of garbage on top that the unixity really doesn’t help much at all.
The 1000 little interface stupidities is what gets me on Mac, like making “cut” part of the “paste” action. I’d get it if they had different terms (Ctrl+c=select, Ctrl+v =duplicate, Ctrl+optV=move) but they’re still called copy paste. Or the delete button on my keyboard being interpreted as page down. Or the enter key being used to rename a file. Or how every action just has to have an animation. It adds up to being just such a mess.
A mac is the only non linux machine I’ll willingly use if I didn’t have the choice.
My trajectory was win 3.11, then macos 7 & 8, then windows 98… Windows 7 > macOS again as a dev > Linux when I finally got to pick my own software and IT wasn’t what paid the bills.
Windows was always broken so you had to learn to fix shit
Mac never did quite what you needed so you had to work around stuff and try harder
… Next/Mac got me very literate with Unix
… Linux is just kinda what I know.
But Unix based macos really is an excellent os. It’s just a shame its so locked to their hardware.
I think this is pretty reasonable and shouldn’t be a hot take. IMO, what macOS does better is to provide a simple UI that protects less experienced users well enough from themselves while keeping developer tools accessible and close enough to standard Unix stuff. It’s easy to get into but not too hard to move past the basics once you need to. In Windows, I often feel like the opposite is true. The UI is a complicated mess of three different UIs that doesn’t even protect users all that well, and developer tools are often separate products with their own learning curve that are aggressively Windows-specific.
I learned how to fix but never how a PC ran on windows. You just can’t really dig into theinnards and fixing it is 9/10 a reinstall.
There was a fairy large era of macs that were way more open to customization then windows. Probably still true because Microsoft has gotten a lot more aggressive about locking down their os and the average gamer has no clue how to install mods if it isn’t from the Steam workshop.
The command line is not the end all and be all of tech literacy. It’s one access point which doesn’t get used that much outside of copy-pasting sudo commands from the internet.
I hate Apple with all my guts, but in all fairness:
problem-solving skills surely don’t correlate. Tech-illiteracy though…very likely does. By anectodal knowledge at least.
I don’t get the hype for Apple stuff. Custom built desktops or frankenlaptops look way cooler and it is a lot of fun to finally figure out what kind of gear you need.
It was always software vs Windows (which it goes without saying has always been trash), but I think nowadays it’s more of a hardware thing, Linux vs Mac OS, it’s not much of a much.
There are of course tons of features missing from the (laptop) hardware, touch screens, modems, any kind of interesting keyboards or folding etc. but the standard and reliability of the features it does have are of a pretty good class.
Desktops who cares
I used to have Asus hybrid tablet laptop and it was my favorite computer simply because it had both keyboard and touchscreen and it was super fun to point your finger at the screen instead of using the touchpad. the downside was that the connector port wore out relatively quickly and it started glitching and then the touchscreen broke down and that was all she wrote for that adventure.
Gotta look like the coolest hipster in Starbucks 👍
what’s cool about it is that custom build is always a Theseus Ship and eventually you switch every single component but it is still your PC.
the iphone was the beginning of the downfall
striping menue options down for usability and “natural gestures” like swiping caused a whole generation to be able to partake in internet discourse without having a basic understanding of how they got there
If you’re using Lemmy there’s a good chance you’ll be excluded from the study. Some of the largest Lemmy communities are Linux related.
Upvoted from my iPhone
I’m studying computer science and while most use Linux, there are definitely more macOS user than Windows… so yeah, I don’t really agree
I started on Mac, then went to Windows, and now Linux. 🤷♂️ Work as a software engineer… Nothing to see here, folks.
I started on Mac, went to Windows, then Linux, then ChromeOS, and now back to Linux and Mac for work. I work as a web dev and my contribution to my team is my extreme ADHD
You guys are contributing to your team?
Technically started on Apple II at school, at home we first got a 286 PC compatible running Windows 3.1 and some version of DOS, then in 5th/6th grade had a little exposure to Macs at school before switching to schools where everything was Windows. Didn’t touch a Mac again until college and it was another 8 years or so before I got comfortable with them. Now I barely touch Windows and am starting to get into Linux and have my eye on potentially trying some variants of BSD also.
As always, this is a relatively tech-knowledgeable platform. 99% of people didn’t know shit about computers before or after the advent of the iphone, and even before that, building a PC wasn’t on the radar for most.
OTOH fixing issues with computers, PC users would know way more than a Apple user because PCs had way more issues. Not really a flex, but certainly relevant to the discussion.
PCs had way more options, as it was an open hardware system sort of (any company could make the hardware). If your apple broke, there was just nothing you could do too.
Sure. That was the pro and con for PCs. You could do whatever with them, but it meant that in doing whatever there was plenty of opportunity to break things or discover incompatibilities. Apple otoh was fuck you, you’re only doing what we let you do. I despised the walled garden, so I’ve been PC/Windows/Linux forever.
I started on Apple 2 then Macs. Then used my graduation money to build a PC with just released Windows 98, Monster Voodoo video card a few months later (off of eBay no less).
Gamed and worked through my design degree on windows before switching back to Mac when it went Intel, and because I was working in web development and l dealing with Linux servers all day, but also needed Photoshop and layer Sketch (a nice vector UI design tool) and later as I ditched Adobe in my own company, Pixelmator (a nice Photoshop replacement).
I know a little Vi, I know a bit about spinning up servers and Ruby on Rails, pretty comfortable with a terminal/cli, have a few RPis around the house, and I grew up on and still use Macs.
I’d take macOS over Windows anyday if those were my only choices. It’s UNIX so a ton of Linux knowledge is transferrable.
What’s with Lemmy and someone jumping into every thread like “LINUX IS MY MASTER!”
I constantly playing whack a mole and blocking all the Linux cultists communities
If they’re implying that growing up with a Mac means worse problem solving skills because they don’t go wrong as much clearly didn’t experience MacOS prior to 10.
As a non autistic Linux user since I was 14, I concur.
“discluded”
I grew up with DOS.
C-64 -> DOS (at school) -> Unix (at uni) -> Every Windows from 3.1 to Win10 including some NT -> Linux/Win10
That pretty much dates me, with that huge stretch of time.
Messed around with Linux a few times on and off (Mandrake was first), never took the plunge until recently where it's now my primary. And it's not Arch.
How about the tech skills of kids who actually built their first computer?
Mac as a kid, Windows for most of my life so far, Linux as a couple years now. I graduated a tech bootcamp with some good certs for DevOps/Cybersecurity, but they’re expiring soon because the area I live has zero job openings and I completed the whole thing right as the AI “boom” was starting. Ugh
I built by first PC when I was 12, I guess I’m autistic.
Any correlation would likely be related to socio-economic status ie class. Macs were always more expensive, that's going to skew wealthier, which has way more impact on developement and learning than which OS you used as a kid.
Also Apple IIe to start then Power Mac briefly, thanks to school. Later at home Windows 3.1 - Windows 7 I think, Back to OS X, Back to Win 10, Win 11, terror and enlightenment, now Linux.
Knowing how awesome a computer could be with the Power Mac made me demand more from a Windows machine, and then understand early on the disappointment with Windows that would last most of my life.
My first machine was an Apple 2e. The first IBM machine I used was on DOS. I don’t think I even saw Windows until Windows 95.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 55 minutes ago
Ummm how do kids turn out if you install Linux Mint on a cheap laptop and give it to them to screw around with? Asking for a friend.
ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one 4 minutes ago
It leads the kid to Arch. I hope you prepared to always hear “I use Arch, btw.”