Children use smartphones way more than “PC” computers today.
I am probably the only person ever to grow up with a UNIX terminal server as my home computer. any crazy IT thing i do now pales in comparison to my dad, running ethernet cables through our heating ducts in a probable building code violation
**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
…you dad did very well; give him a hug this december…
So here’s a teacher’s insight:
Mac:PC:Chromebook Rich—Poor
There is a very strong correlation between the wealth of the kids on my module, and the device they have.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of local files without being shown. PC users, alas, snort too much SharePoint these days to be considered healthy - trying to save a word document locally these days is like climbing a mountain blindfolded. As for the Chromebook kids, they do their best with what they have, and given how little compatibility those devices have with the software I teach, I’m proud of them.
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Most of the time it’s realising the difference between local and cloud storage. A lot of students get confused when trying to upload their first coursework - usually it’s solved by just showing them the difference between local files (this is stored in a permanent local place) and cloud storage (this is stored permanently somewhere else).
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Maybe it’s to do with the number of mouse buttons.
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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?”
“Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results”
“Autism involves a significant deviation from expected behaviour”
They have played us for absolute fools.
(I know autism describes a real cluster of traits, but it is only socially constructed norms that define those traits as aberrant, I am not saying it isn’t real)
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)
The weird thing is that the UNIX core of MacOS would lend itself really well to tinkering. It’s a shame that Apple lobotomizes all the hardware they sell with locked down firmware…
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.
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.
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Hey! 🙋 I’m an autistic person (diagnosed at age 3). I grew up using Mac computers mostly, because my father preferred them for his work. Although I would encounter Windows a lot when I was at school as well. However, I didn’t really know how to use Windows until I started seeing videos on YouTube about it (such as this one). This was when I was around 10. So I started experimenting with different editions of it (Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows XP, etc.) via a pirated copy of Parallels Desktop. I also found out about Linux, and toyed with Ubuntu with a bit via Parallels. I found it fun, and thus considered the idea of installing Linux properly onto my Macbook. Unfortunately, the trackpad support wasn’t there. So for my 11th birthday, I asked for a “Windows laptop”, and immediately after getting it, I set up some dual-boot with Windows 10 and some fork of Ubuntu called “Pinguy OS”. (I spent way too much time looking at DistroWatch.) Then, I distro-hopped for a bit until I finally settled on Void Linux when I was 13. I’m now 18 and am running Void full-time on my current laptop, it doesn’t even have a Windows partition. :)
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.
Ayy! 🤝
I’m also thinking of trying KDE the next time I install Linux. I’ve been using GNOME for the vast majority of my time on Linux, though I’ve also dabbled with Xfce and Antergos’ built-in OpenBox configuration for a short while.
Awesome! What made you pick void?
Apologies for the late reply, my internet went down for a day. Anyway, before I was using a distro called Antergos (basically Arch with an easy installer and a few custom packages). When it was discontinued, some people waited for what is basically its spiritual successor, EndeavourOS. Others switched to using vanilla Arch. But I decided to use Void after some research, as to me it was Arch but with a few advantages to my favour:
- At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn’t (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now,
archinstallexists, I guess. - It’s still rolling-release, so you can update whenever you want easily, but at the same time not bleeding-edge, so packages don’t break as easily.
- Unlike most Linux distros, it uses runit as the init system instead of systemd. I’m no rabid systemd hater, but you gotta admit that runit is just easier to learn how to use.
- And finally, by adopting a non-major distro, I just wanted to promote Linux apps being compatible with as many distros as possible, and not just either Debian, Fedora, or Arch (or whatever derivatives exist thereof).
(Also, happy cake day! I didn’t know Lemmy had cake days until now hehe :)
- At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn’t (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now,
I’ve been a dev for 7 years. I used a PC for the first 6 years and I switched to a mac the last year.
My experience with mac has been terrible. The file explorer is just horrible to navigate. It took me ages to find the way to go anywhere except the “favorite” folders. Compability with the remote linux-servers has been awful with broken keymappings and shortcuts. Using hardware from any other manifacturer is riddled with bugs. The machine is unable to adjust volume if the audio is passed through usb-c. And I routinely encounter bugs where I’m unable to interact with apps until I restart them. Everything which seemed to work by heuristics on a PC requires a lot of attention on my mac. I don’t care if I get a floaty animation and bouncy icon if I minimize a window. I just want alt + tab to actually bring back the apps I select.
I am not getting a mac the next time.
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.I respect that muscle memory is a big thing when iit comes to OS preference. I have spent more than a year now to configure to my preferences and build up muscle memory and understanding of my mac. It’s just not happening. Small things which were trivial to me on PC suddenly requires my full attention and I feel like I’m spending a ton of energy doing simple things. And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
But my biggest issue is the hardware compability. I like my mechanical logitech keyboard, which features a mac layout (physical stamps on keys). But several buttons are mixed up when connected. And the key mapping seemingly varies depending on whether it’s connected through bluetooth or usb. As mentioned audio passed through usb-c is not possible to adjust thourgh the default system. I had to download a third party app to adjust volume - which also stinks because the volume at the lowest setting is a lot higher than I want for some cases. My stream deck seems to work with the mac by a coinflip: half of the times I start the machine, it won’t connect.
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
And that’s where I really fall off. I want to use hardware which I find comfortable to me, but it feels like everything about the mac is trying to make me buy more apple stuff.
And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
That’s really strange, can you give some examples? Just curious what things are easier to do on Windows (assuming that’s what you mean), I just have never had that be the case. Maybe it’s cause I’m a webdev and most tooling for web stuff is tailored for *nix systems?
But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.
Uh whaaaaat that’s crazy. Yeah I’m the same way, I’ve cycled through a lot of different mechanical keyboards and whatnot to find the one I like now (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, dumb name but nice features lol). But I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with a keyboard having hardware compatibility like that… I guess I don’t really use function keys. Again I use Karabiner to remap that kinda stuff to a different layer, which works universally so the same layering works on my laptop as my mechanical keyboard and I don’t need to have different muscle memory for different work-zone setups.
This is the article that got me introduced to Karabiner, even if you hate Mac I do recommend giving it a look. One of the best things I ever did was use Karabiner to modify my layout and reduce hand movement/chording. It completely fixed my RSI issues. My current layout treats the JKL; home row keys as arrow keys when I hold down Capslock, and Capslock + CMD turns them into jump-by-word so I can navigate really fast. Rarely use a mouse when writing code these days. Oh, and Capslock + ’ is delete, surprising how often that is a common hand movement. Plus plenty of other small optimizations. Really couldn’t live without it.
So a few examples on the first point:
When connected to a virtual desktop at the project me and my collegues are currently working with, the mac has a weird keybinding issue where keys passed through to the virtual image are mixed up. No windows computer has this issue. At my previous project, the same issue occurred for those who used macs to access virtual desktops. Also, some of the shortcuts are consumed by the OS, making them inaccessible.
Connecting to multiple monitors is weird. The hardware at my office allows for daisy-chaining connected to a laptop through a single USB-C. At least for PC. Both my collegues and I have struggles with connecting to the monitors, and typically, we end up having to rewire the screens to have multiple inputs to the mac.
So the things from the top of my head are probably mostly software related, and it might be environmental issues with lack of support in virtualizations and firmware of the office equipment.
Regarding the keyboard issues, it might be a local problem. I use a Norwegian Logitech keyboard, featuring a layout with ÆØÅ and different locations for several symbols compared to the US-layout. So maybe the compability differs because of that.
I’ll check out Karabiner for sure, thanks! I use a Vim-plugin for developing and have made a bunch of mappings to reach keys which are mixed up in the virtual desktop. It sounds like Karabiner would fit my workflow well!
I’m should bring that Ubuntu CD I had shipped to me as a kid to a therapist.
I had one i lost it. i also had a CD of solaris before oracle bought them out a long time ago.
I still have my SuSE 8.2 9.0 and 9.1 discs, and the official books I bought in a book store to get 9.1. I also have my Solaris discs. They are somehow part of the few things I haven’t lost in all of my moving.
my parents kept them then threw them out when i left home.
Imagine paying for a blue tick on Xitter.
could’ve been before elongated muskrat bought it
It’s not unfortunately, there’s a date of 09/12/2024 under the original tweet
oh… oh… oh…
Literally the first definition says it’s an out of use synonym for exclusion
That it is, my bad.
Thank for noting.
Although I some how think she wasn’t exactly using it in the archaic sense on purpose, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
My first memory with a computer was playing (more like trying to play) Microsoft flight simulator 1.0 on a Macintosh when I was around 8-9. The thing that looks like that:
I only started using Linux when installed dual boot Ubuntu on the family computer around 14-15.
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
I’ve learned C++ when I was 10. Should I have myself checked?
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.
When I was probably like 10 or 11 or something I started learning JavaScript because I thought it was the language Minecraft was written in (It’s actually Java)
which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn’t exist.
That’s assembley
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 :(
Where’re all the DOS kids at?! 5 hours and 66 comments, but not a single mention yet.
Never mind solving problems with Windows; shit gets real when the thing boots to a
C:\>prompt and you need to know things like the difference between CGA/EGA/VGA/Hercules graphics modes and WTF an IRQ is just to install your games in the first place.Kids these days don’t know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.
or defragging a disk.
I was talking to a friend just the other day about that. I remember some application we used to reconfigure autoexec.bat to optimize it for one type of memory or the other, but I can’t remember the name of the application (I think it came with the OS), and I can’t remember what the different memory types were called either.
IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.
I figured it out - it was memmaker. It automatically edited autoexec.bat (and possibly also config.sys, I’m not sure).
Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.
Well, at least in our case, it wasn’t something that we bought. I’m pretty sure it came with our MS-DOS.
Oh, you’re right, it’s right there in the link you shared–it was built in to MS-DOS, but only from version 6 on. I must have misremembered it as paid because it was something we didn’t have, and then later we did.
You ran emm386.com as a TSR (terminate, stay present) to set up extended memory according to my very stretched memory
That might have been one way of doing it, but I seem to remember a more mnemonic name - something like “memmaker,” perhaps?
Edit: Yep, it was memmaker.
memmaker?
That was it, yes.
If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive
Pop quiz: which graphics mode is that screenshot?
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.
When windows was at version 3, I mostly had the computer booting to command prompt, type win to start windows
Though at some point I made a boot menu in autoexec.bat to let you choose windows, command prompt, or any of the games installed
DOS was a step backwards for me from Atari TOS.
What were the Atari terms of service?
/sEasy mistake to make, but terms of service are abbreviated as ToS, not TOS ;-)
Ah, so you mean this:
Alright, I’ll admit it: my first computer ran Tandy Deskmate, not just plain DOS.
Still, I did have to exit to a command line to run certain games, I think.
in a care home presumably
Listen here you little shit.
spoiler
(Seriously though, DOS kids are like ~40 years old. We’re xennials, not boomers.)
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.
The only thing I remember from that era is inserting floppy dics to play games
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
I remember when discs got big enough that we could have windows 3.1 installed as well as a current tech game
I will not miss setting up interrupts for cards, I will not miss setting up extended memory
Though all that would have been easier were I older. I was in my 20s when Linux became available and the early experience with DOS had me happy to dive right into that
tweaking himem.sys was a skill in and of itself :-)
“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
prompt?
I don’t even know which way the split would go. Many people i know studying computer science first year have a macbook, in what seems disproportionate. Maybe just general university student bias? also apple walled garden* lol *on the iPhone
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.
Couldn’t just ssh in to the school machines when you weren’t in the lab?
That’s what I meant by “use the lab machines”. Basically you can do the work on your own devices if it is Mac or Linux but are expected to ssh or remote desktop into the lab machines if you have windows
I heard gen z mostly has iphone
As an Old, I started with an Apple ][ and learned BASIC. We did get the classic B&W Macintosh computers when I was 12-13.
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.
