I feel that is the difference we're seeing though. Younger kids who generally live on smart devices have lower tech literacy.

Switching from apple is like breaking out of prison.

I don't know. I think Mac gets a lot of hate simply because it's a Unix that was sold to the devil and comes with a satanic concierge service.

Like, I'm not saying that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if I had to pick a handful of people that on the whole I would say probably did I would pick Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon musk, Jeffrey bezos, Larry Page, Vladimir Putin, and probably every Hollywood social elite and musician that sells a platinum record, every Republican senator, congress person, and every president after Jimmy Carter, and every CEO whose company is worth more than 10 million dollars who didn't inherit the company from their parents.

growing up my family had a mac desktop that i had access to while really young. eventually realized mac is a little terrible, so i tried bootcamp to get some proper use out of the computer. i successfully installed windows, but somehow fucked up and formatted the mac partition. all for windows to also suck

Eh, I grew up with Macs, but I couldn't afford a Mac for my first computer, or even a windows license. I got a computer from a family friend that was broken which I fixed up and installed Linux on.

This isn't right at all... Mac's are awful if you want to do things like play most video games. Linux is much the same.

That's right. I said it. Come downvote me, fanboys, I don't mind. I've seen what makes you cheer.

Counterpoint, I grew up at a time when Mac's still couldn't do much outside of what apple specifically developed for them, so I learned a ton about emulation and virtual machines and such to play games or use Photoshop. I guess that supports your hypothesis, I can rock Unix command line stuff and containers like a pro, but hate figuring out drivers

Move back to Tumblr

Awesome! What made you pick void?

Yooo, another autistic geek 2006er!

I was diagnosed at age 4 and i started with Flash games on a Windows 7 family desktop. The first PC i could keep in my bedroom was an old netbook with XP and Lubuntu gifted to me by my mom(i only used the linux part tho). Then, later, another XP-era laptop with Linux Mint, before the current win10 laptop i have today(used it with Windows so far cuz i'm lazy and i used to need windows software but i plan to Linuxize this as soon as win10 is discontinued)

When i take the jump i'm prolly gonna settle for KDE Neon or any other Debian-based that can run KDE and then try to theme it to get something as close to Frutiger Aero as possible.

I don't understand the correlation with technical people on Mac. Like I DONT GET IT 😭
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want? I tried to use a cracked iPhone before deciding just to buy a new android because I just bout exploded with the corporate shenanigans apple has.

Edit: It would appear that Mac is very different from IOS. Ive never tried it other than 15 minutes of fiddling with a friends once, nice to know it's not as locked down as IOS is.
Many thanks, but I hardly understand this conversation lol

I think that's the gist of it. Apple is so hell bent on proprietary everything and keeping their hardware locked that there isn't all that much you can tinker with when using a Mac. Aside from the high price of apple products, the customizability of PCs (and the access to games) are what kept me on windows.

Could be, could also be she is generally actually curious about it. I would actually think its the opposite since your problem solving skills are exercised more on a windows than a mac. Computer science people will engineer a solution from the ground up while the rest of us will problem solve and be happy with something held together with duct tape.

Ironically, I found macOS to be a lot more technical than Windows. It's how I got my start with Linux. At least changing the default browser changes the default browser. I'll be using macOS and Linux side by side.

It's why I much prefer MacOS over Windows. The command line makes sense. The file and folder structure makes sense. The defaults can be a little bit weird but a little configuration can help me feel right at home.

I had one i lost it. i also had a CD of solaris before oracle bought them out a long time ago.

Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of

For me, it was trying to explain to a Mac user that she should have a separate profile on her Mac for work vs. personal

She'd convinced her employer that she could work from home using her own Mac (the office was all Macs except for the video production suite), and he said OK. Didn't ask me, of course. Despite me saying a long time ago when someone else floated the idea, that it was poor practice from a security viewpoint.

Then three days later the call came - "I can't access work files". So I remote in, she's got links to her personal iCloud Drive directories somehow mixed up with the work Google Drive.

I started to explain about using a different profile for work and just got a blank stare.

"You log off your personal profile and log into the work profile"

"How do I do that?"

I feel the same way about any machine that isn't a Linux laptop with fully implemented hardware support. I can't stand macos or windows anymore.

In Apple's defense though, they have better accessibility than anyone else - hands down. That's about all they do right IMO.

I dunno, I used PCs pretty exclusively until about halfway through college when I switched and every time I try to go back it’s pretty bad. Windows sucks, it just does everything different than *nix systems, and they have like, 5 different ways of doing things? It feels like they’ve had multiple efforts to clean up the tech debt and never completed them.

And Linux is just lacking for day to day use. I still would love to switch at some point, but it just doesn’t have the right tools and polish. Like, I rely on Karabiner for key remapping and layering and the Linux story is pretty lacking there (though I haven’t looked in a while so could have gotten better). Core stuff for my day to day.

I think a lot of it is muscle memory. Like yeah, it’s hard to relearn a lot of muscle memory type things. But if you open a terminal, it’s just like any *nix based system, same layout. You can navigate anywhere and open the Finder with open, etc.

Those beautiful graphics. That dithering though!

Wow that is awesome! I have big nostalgia for the early B&W Macs as well, having played on a Mac Classic my uncle had when I was a kid. He actually gave me that computer years ago and it’s still in my basement collecting dust. I powered it up a few years ago and it still worked but then promptly powered it down and put it away. I need to go through it and recap it. Hopefully there aren’t any disastrous leaks.

My dad had this flight sim on his old PC! That internal speaker and the BW graphics... another one of those games was the keyboard destroyer decathlon.

My first MS flight simulator was 4, the graphics were similar, but in VGA

My first game was probably 1944 or moon buggy

Literally the first definition says it's an out of use synonym for exclusion

Kids these days don't know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.

If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ef6f62ed-0fb5-4130-9690-8e2fad730ac5.webp

DOS was a step backwards for me from Atari TOS.

Now I'm glad I was at the tail end of DOS. My dad showed me how to interrupt the windows boot to get into DOS for Lemmings and Doom, but for everything else like Anno 1602, Need for Speed 2 and Age of Empires 1, I used Windows 95.

in a care home presumably

I absolutely still remember my grandfather having a dual 5.25” IBM and teaching my 6-7 yo self how to use the cli. I still remember that MSDOS 2.0 box he had up on his shelf, and how he taught me to keep a simple text file of the prices of my baseball cards, according to the legendary Beckett price guide.

I then later vaguely messing around with 3.11 followed by 95+, but the basis of my mediocre understanding of the cli was due to my grandfather teaching me on DOS 2.0.

DOS5 here, installed from 5.25" floppies on a tiny HDD and looking at one of those awful shades-of-yellow monitors.

That's if you don't count the computer that didn't have a hard drive and ONLY booted from 3.5" floppy (which was just enough to get a bootable DOS disk and Prince of Persia).

IRQ's were great for choice. You got to your modem, video card, and soundcard and then picked which two would actually work when they all wanted IRQ5 or 7

“What is that high memory area stuff they added in DOS4?”

gets swallowed by rabbit hole for days

“Oh, that!”

I had 3.1, 95, 98se, XP(teenager).

I got in at I'd say the best time. XP for the Internet as a teenager was absolutely the best time to be a teenager with computers.

Does anyone still know the C> prompt?

The only thing I remember from that era is inserting floppy dics to play games

according to the US gov, C and C++ pose a threat to national security because they are a "memory unsafe" language. I hope you can recover from all the pain and memory leaks you had to endure by transitioning to Rust. /s

No point, c++ already contaminated you. Better than getting java in you early, but both have their own expression of mental illness. I think both are better than C, which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn't exist.

Only if you have trouble functioning. The only reason for diagnosis is access to care.

But, yeah, prior odds are significant ;)

Nah, you already know the problem, you just need to self medicate.

it's not going to cause any additional harm:)))

i only knew HTML and CGI scripts :(

You're skewing the results

Despite growing up in the 90s, a Commodore 128 was the only computer we had until maybe 1998, when we upgraded to some sort of Macintosh. It was just Frogger, Montezuma's Revenge and OutNumbered! for me on computers until we finally got a Dell of some sort running Windows XP in like 2004.

I got all the pain of different OSes growing up, but now it's just Linux and OpenBSD for me these days.

having all the time in the world is a perk of being 5-6 that allows you to learn things like that especially when they come in a shiny new game box. I don't think that's necessarily indicative of anything.

could've been before elongated muskrat bought it

Yep, this study would have to divide things up by age. As a fellow member of the Oregon Trail generation, all my early computers were also Apple ][ and b&w macs. But then eventually by young adulthood it all turned into PCs.

I enjoyed a stint with Solaris in college (that’s SUN Solaris thankyouverymuch) which I consider my true intro to Linux/posix/whatever-ix.

I started on a Pr1me 550 type II learning BASIC myself. Apple ][s came out about 4 years later. Then I used them. Windows SA now.

My youth was at least partly misspent hacking z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC664. Not as many regrets as one might assume. I miss when (8-bit) assembler was simple enough to hand-code without playing "surf the reference manual".

I learned basic on an old trash 80 from radio shack in the late 70's. I really miss mucking around with it.

Edit: Now I use Linux.

You're not onto anything so there's no need to "hold on". Several people did the same thing without some stupid disorder being The Reason Why.

I pirated applications and games at 9 because remotely breathing in my family's presence was the equivalent of screaming fire in a crowded theater. Why would I ask them anything when I can ask Google? Google won't hit me, tie me to a chair, lock me in a basement, scream at me, spit on me, or take all my possessions indefinitely. Google also won't tell professional child abusers what I searched so that can be used to emotionally abuse me more.

Why would I ask people who would scream at me for asking for a 64¢ candy bar, about a $200 application? Why would I tell them about something illegal? That's just asking for drama. But sure, some stupid ass puzzle piece Made Me So Smart and that's why I pirated gamemaker and fl studio. The same puzzle piece that made me so (r word) and unfit for society that I needed to be locked away in an institution that dumbed me down into a dead weight.

Also using a computer is as easy as playing a video game. The directions and definitions are straightforward. Some stupid puzzle piece didn't made a kid know how to do something, the kid taught themselves by reading. Which the people pointing to some stupid puzzle piece can do as well, instead of reducing a human being to some stupid ass puzzle piece. Literally dehumanizing but I'm ready to be the problem, as a human asking to be treated as a human. Downvotes mean nothing.

They told us we should have a linux or a mac in first year comp sci and if we didn't we should use the lab machines. Probably because they are both unix like operating systems.

I heard gen z mostly has iphone

I used ResEdit to fix an issue with my school's email system.

Someone used a Hypercard stack I made to "break" a computer, It got me banned from the school computers. Same school even.

Oh my god I forgot about hypercard...wowww. Memories.

Keep in mind that autism is a spectrum

**As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands... I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It's fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered "needed.". Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and "evacuate" only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months.... But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)

Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018

Your comment doesn't make sense, unless it's just some really dry ironic humour

That damn "warranty void if removed" sticker. I wasn't allowed to tinker with the old family Win3.1 PC until 1999 because of that damn sticker, and only because we finally replaced the old dinosaur with a shiny new Windows 98 SE laptop.

The irony is that I regret my decision. 11-year-old me thought it would be a good idea to take the entire thing apart without knowing how to put it back together, so I never did. It would have been nice to still have it around to relive childhood memories...

On the bright side, it sparked my interest in building my own PCs, which I was finally able to do in 2008 after saving up my money. Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB of DDR2 800, and a Radeon HD 4850. Built it powerful enough to run Crysis. It couldn't run most games beyond 45 FPS, but back then that was good enough for me. These days even 120Hz no longer looks as smooth as it used to. Can't wait for the day when we finally get blur-free 1000Hz OLEDs

It did when I was, and it was a nightmare even though I was very tech savvy

It’s so much better now

Yes, where we were READY to solve problems like "is that game ported to my system" and "is it any good?"

FWIW, we were also dropped immediately into a BASIC interpreter, day one. PC's may have been priming IT professionals, but were C64 users primed to be programmers?

Indeed. It can hint towards more required research.

It does imply casualson though

Yeah, we create the rules that decide whether or not someone is autistic, and we decide what is viewed as "weird" (honestly, everyone is weird, if you were perfectly average in every way, you would actually, in a way, be weird)

Same, though I think I also picked up SUSE and slackware around the same time

My parents loved and cherished me growing up, and still do, which is part of why I was the only kid in sixth grade with a laptop (the other part was I had a disability accommodation with the school that allowed me to type my assignments rather than write them by hand). The fact that they encouraged my programming talent at that age, didn't get mad when I installed a Fedora dual-boot on that laptop, and bought me the book Python for Kids for my 12th birthday, is why I'm a programmer now.

I'm sorry your parents didn't show you the love and support you deserved, but that's not the criterion we should be looking for.

I too started with Linux at 14. I just got my first computer, an old laptop with Windows. It was too slow and I couldn't even figure out anything in settings. (Windows 10 and its Settings + reduced Control Panel).

I at first tried to find "Linux". I had little idea about it, but I thought Linux must be it, and these others were just modifications, so I kept trying to find "pure Linux". Eventually figured out the distributions thing and decided on Mint (MATE).
I dug through all old movies just to find a rarity. One single movie burned to DVD-RW, perfect! (First computer, why would I have a USB drive?)

In the end I was using Windows for whopping 2 days.

And since I finally had a proper computer, it only took a few months and my phone was running a custom ROM (PixelExperience).

Chuck Yeager's air combat? I played that on PC

Clowns to the left of me

Jokers to the right

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you