I think it’s a bit harsh to lay all the blame on google, considering the iPad exists.
Same shit different bucket.
I’d argue the iPad is the bigger offender personally. They’re blaming Chromebooks because that’s often what schools provided, but the same exact timing existed before with iMacs in classrooms all through the 90s and early 00s for millennials despite Windows being by far the more common real world OS they would need to know in the workplace.
But when it comes to portable devices the iPhone and iPad are king, that’s what young people want and often what they’re given. And those operate nearly exactly the same as a Chromebook. Toss everything into a cloud bucket, no user-facing folder structures to learn, everything locked down with limited access and customization. A take it or leave it approach to user interaction.
I have user-facing folder structures on every iOS device I own. What exactly is the extent of your personal experience using iOS?
My experience with iOS devices is mostly non-jailbroken devices, where the file system is not accessible.
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A very limited scope of the filesystem instead of exposing the whole thing. Android does the same thing, and so does every system that doesn’t allow the user to have root access.
Ohh…the files are in the computer
Not trying to be rude but the files app is absolutely not giving you anything close to full access to your devices file system. It’s an abstraction over the actual file system if anything.
Yeah there’s a lot more visible just by connecting via USB but it’s still not good.
Thats already more effort than most people will put forth
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Just to get this straight: you’re comparing the complexity of using OS X to Chrome OS. I hope you’re not also claiming you’ve actually used both of these?
Edit: also, what do you mean “no user-facing folder structures to learn”? iPadOS I get because even though it has one and has for years, it’s not required. But again: have you ever used Chrome OS? I would sooner use TempleOS, and somehow you still managed to make an invalid criticism of such a dogshit operating system.
Edit 2: 23 downvotes; 0 explanations of how I’m wrong. Stay classy, Lemmy.
Huh? I used ChromeOS and Mac OS for work, study and play and I can’t honestly say one is particularly more simplistic or even user-friendly (dumbed-down) than the other. But ChromeOS is significantly less locked down overall in that getting root access on the device is much, much simpler.
- The thing about root access is just objectively untrue. These are the steps to gain root access on macOS as provided by Apple. Meanwhile, I can find no official tutorial from Google, and more importantly, enabling developer mode wipes your Chromebook. I legitimately cannot imagine what on god’s green Earth you did to make the macOS process more painstaking than wiping your device.
- Even if your premise weren’t demonstrably untrue, this isn’t a discussion about what you can theoretically do with a device; it’s about the kind of workflow the device would encourage for a typical student using it. In this regard, a Chromebook is massively dumbed down. Sure you might dip into the downloads folder, but Chrome OS by design encourages the use of web apps as much as humanly possible and severely restricts your ability and incentives to meaningfully interact with your OS outside of a browser.
- Even assuming that the process of gaining root access mattered to this discussion (it categorically doesn’t), what you can and cannot do with that root access would matter far more, and in that unrelated discussion, macOS clearly still wins out (unless you’d want to argue that developer mode lets you install Linux, at which point this is no longer about Chrome OS).
Meanwhile, I can find no official tutorial from Google
This is such an unserious strawman of an argument, how do you not get embarrassed writing this?
There’s no official tutorial for most Android devices either, it doesn’t mean it’s harder to do than on Apple devices.
Even if your premise weren’t demonstrably untrue
Just saying something is so doesn’t make it so, to demonstrate my premise is untrue you have to actually demonstrate how it’s untrue, which you have not done.
it’s about the kind of workflow the device would encourage for a typical student using it
You mean like how Mac OS is locked to the Mac OS App Store by default only, featuring mainly proprietary payware unless you toggle an obscure bypass in the settings, while ChromeOS lets you run any unsigned code for ChromeOS, Linux and Android with minimal effort, all of which are either fully or partially open source and comes with a web browser equipped with a nice set of easily accessible Dev tools, which allows you to examine and learn how web applications are written, architectured and deployed - the largest by far aspect of computer science and software development most people come into contact with regularly?
Even if the conversation was about what you say, you would still be wrong. But it’s not about that, because in a school scenario both would be locked down with an MDM - in Apple’s case literally via serial numbers and network connectivity DRM you can’t realistically block.
And no, this conversation is actually not about that either. A user repairable device doesn’t become less repairable if it discourages your 12 year old from popping out and eating the battery.
severely restricts your ability and incentives to meaningfully interact with your OS outside of a browser.
Any examples on this one, chief? Or you just saying things like that will magically make them true again?
Even assuming that the process of gaining root access mattered to this discussion (it categorically doesn’t),
Of course it does. Really it’s the thing that matters the most.
Sorry but your bailey castle isn’t any more secure than your motte, because access to root is actual freedom over your device, anything less than actual unrestricted root access where I can say, replace the network stack or write and add my own kernel modules for hardware support I want to add or whatever reason I please is by definition not really software (and by extension hardware) I have control over. It’s just another blackbox walled garden.
what you can and cannot do with that root access would matter far more, and in that unrelated discussion, macOS clearly still wins out
Again, do you have any evidence at all to back that up?
And what’s with this weird caveat?
(unless you’d want to argue that developer mode lets you install Linux, at which point this is no longer about Chrome OS).
It’s some real specious reasoning to handwave the most core freedom of all - to simply replace/refuse the OS altogether and bring your own to your hardware, and highly convenient of course because Apple employs many anti-repair, anti-consumer, anti-modification practices from the very screws to their knock-off TPM (T2?) chip to hardware whitelists where everything is married down to the cables and each and every module for no reason other than to maintain control above all.
Please apply more intellectual rigor next time.
Fuck Google and fuck Apple, stop defending them, don’t die on this silly hill and go be free.
Have you even been reading this thread? This is about the level of tech literacy kids get from using an OS for school, not about what you’re theoretically capable of doing. Yes, you’re right, root access on both macOS and Chrome OS would be locked out in a school setting. That makes your braindead argument a non-starter for this discussion. Even if what you said about the rooting difficulty were true (again, showed it isn’t), it could not possibly matter less here. And yes, I am going to say that official, step-by-step documentation that takes a few minutes at most to follow is easier than following some third-party website and then resetting your entire OS.
Even in a situation where it’s not locked down, neckbeards like you and I are in the vanishingly small minority of users who ever touch root access; when we’re talking about generations of people being raised to be tech-illiterate, root access has fuck-all to do with that. Unless the OS is incentivizing average users to use root access enough that a sizable portion actually would (desktop Linux and nothing else), then a comparison of which OS gives easier root access couldn’t be less relevant when talking about an entire generation of kids.
Here, Chrome OS is meaningfully much worse than OS X for teaching kids tech literacy on the grounds that the average user experience is dumbed down to hell. Meanwhile:
Fuck Google and fuck Apple, stop defending them
Literally where? I’ve done nothing but lambast Chrome OS this entire thread except to correctly point out that it has user-facing folders which you do often interact with. Apple? By correctly pointing out that the Apple desktop ecosystem is massively less dumbed-down than Chrome OS, I’m defending them? Dude, I use Linux and Android (the latter begrudgingly; locked bootloader) and would never purchase an Apple product again for the foreseeable future; next time, save your sweaty, mouth-foaming screed about Apple bad for when you actually find someone who likes and supports Apple.
I ain’t reading all that.
You are angry asf and need to chill tf out, restating your points over and over doesn’t make them true, but it does make you sound like an aggro troglodyte.
You need to back up your shit and learn to formulate actual arguments, not just arbitrary statements you keep repeating. Stop being an aggressively incorrect moron and start thinking.
Neckbeards Mouth-foaming screed Braindead
Speak for yourself bruh.
Anyway, it’s not very hard to understand:
Root access = control of device, control of device = ability to experiment. Ability to experiment = potential for tech literacy. Potential for tech literacy = tech literacy
Mac OS = locked down and dumbed down = tech illiteracy Chrome OS = Linux with chrome = tech literacy.
Also, blocked.
You’re not wrong. This is just lemmy.
The original commenter compared ipados to chromeos, and they compared osx to windows, I never saw a comparison from osx to chromeos.
The point being made is that modern operating systems often times in the hands of kids (chromeos and ipados) are designed to abstract away much of the underlying elements of the os.
They absolutely compared OS X to Chrome OS by directly comparing what Apple did in the 90s and 00s to what Google did in the 10s. If you take the comment as its own isolated thing, sure; if you understand it as a response to another comment (which it is), then the comparison is smacking you in the face.
What planet am I on right now? Should this conversation be about media literacy instead of tech literacy?
It is rich that you are suggesting this should be about media literacy. How do you connect “what apple did on the 90s” and “what chrome OS did in the 00s” (which it was the 10s, not the 00s) as a direct comparison between operating systems? What the commenter is suggesting is that both google and apple had a hand in making students not prepared to interact with technology, not that they did it in the same way.
I don’t even agree with that statement as I believe being exposed to macs at school (and likely windows at home) woild be beneficial to tech literacy. But you couldn’t even comprehend enough to engage with the point. They were saying macos is not windows, and windows is what kids should be learning. Then you come in and yell and scream about mac being better than chrome.
You were down voted because you were wrong and an asshole
How do you connect “what apple did on the 90s” and “what chrome OS did in the 00s” (which it was the 10s, not the 00s) as a direct comparison between operating systems?
Because they’re directly saying that Apple did with Macintosh what Google did with Chromebooks and that wasn’t a problem for real-world tech literacy.
What the commenter is suggesting is that both google and apple had a hand in making students not prepared to interact with technology, not that they did it in the same way.
Except that they’re using iMacs as a precedent that dumbed-down Chromebooks didn’t (at least substantially) harm tech literacy. My interpretation is somehow a generous one, because the other interpretation is that they’re comparing the iMac being complex but different from the industry standard to Chrome OS being dumbed down. These are two vastly different things.
I comprehended enough: either option is stupid as fuck – just one indicates a lack of evidence while the other indicates a lack of basic logic.
You were down voted because you were wrong […]
I’m wrong? Yeah, I originally said “00s and 10s” for Chrome OS because I thought it came out in 2008, but I looked it up and corrected myself yesterday(?) to just “10s” – completely incidental to the point of my comment. Did you notice too that OS X didn’t exist in the 90s but I called it that anyway for simplicity? No? Oh, that’s right: no one actually gives a shit.
Meanwhile, they’re spouting provable and obvious misinformation about how Chrome OS doesn’t have a user-facing folder system, so I think your explanation for why I was downvoted should leave out “I was wrong”. Clearly the voters didn’t give a shit about factual accuracy. I’m sure the other commenter used Chrome OS enough to judge it when they’re saying that. Weird how you didn’t address the part of my comment correcting transparent misinformation.
You were down voted because you were […] an asshole
I was an asshole. And any mixture of “wrong” and “an asshole” gets blind upvotes on Lemmy all the time. No, what got me downvotes is that Lemmy doesn’t have Reddit’s hidden votes feature that stops a cascade of morons blindly downvoting anything that’s at negative (I was at +2, -23 when I made my second edit; just acknowledging that blind, uncritical downvoting took that ratio from ~1:11 to ~1:3). And I’ll continue being a condescending asshole until this Lemmy equivalent of boomers giving one star to businesses they’ve never been to – because Google asked them to rate their experience – is dead.
Have a nice day.
Based on this small exchange it seems like you erect straw men to knock down to inflate your intellectual self worth which is incredibly fragile based on how much you freaked out over a tiny correction that I didn’t use at all in my argument.
If you are actually interested in engaging with the topic try harder to read what I have said
Probably not so much that you’re wrong as you just sound like a condescending dick.
No smarm this time: my question was 100% genuine. I actually don’t know how you can use these operating systems and draw those conclusions. This feels like they ate someone else’s half-baked opinions left out overnight, got food poisoning, and threw them up into this comment.
Also, in my opinion, being condescending is the correct response to people confidently spewing complete, easily disprovable bullshit. I confidently get things wrong sometimes too, but I’m getting really sick of this “I’m qualified to speak on everything” culture that social media is exacerbating.
It is more basic than that:
“It just works” is terrible for developing computer skills.
It is damned convenient for the most part, but it removes the opportunity to have an issue and solve it, developing your troubleshooting skills.
Then we come to the lack of verbosity of modern operating systems and programs.
“Oops, there is an issue, please wait while we solve it…” is an absolutely terrible error message.
“Error 0x001147283b - Fatal error” is a far better error message.
I agree with the the sentiment of your comment, but I think both error codes aren’t great.
I want error logs or descriptions, not a cryptic code that the Company selling the OS can choose not to document publicly.
Error codes are fantastic, even undocumented codes gives users the ability to coordinate on forums and blogs to figure out the issue in a far easier manner
I can google one of these on another device and figure out what it means and at least attempt to fix it. “Something went wrong :(” helps fucking no one
Have you ever worked in an environment powered by Windows-based computers, and Microsoft software? Have you ever spoken with any user in such an environment about their experience with errors like the ones you described, and how easy or difficult it was to solve them?
I am not doing the whole passive aggressive argument where you refuse to say what your issue is and hold a clear conversation so you can try and seem like the winner and claim that I am an idiot because you have misunderstood my comment.
But to answer the specific questions posted:
Have you ever worked in an environment powered by Windows-based computers, and Microsoft software?
Yes, it has been my job for fifteen years.
Have you ever spoken with any user in such an environment about their experience with errors like the ones you described, and how easy or difficult it was to solve them?
Not only do I speak with them several times a workday, I am usually the one solving said problems meaning I get to experience it all.
My point stands, I don’t even see yours.
Fair enough, and I appreciate the clarification. That actually reinforces my point. You and I both work with people who use Windows daily and encounter these verbose errors—but they almost never understand them. They don’t use these messages to develop troubleshooting skills—they just get stuck and frustrated.
So while I get the appeal of a detailed error message in theory, in practice, it doesn’t help most users learn anything. If anything, it just creates more dependency on people like us to fix things for them.
Thank you for accepting my initial rant, I am all for a proper discussion.
I get what you mean, and while true that most people won’t get better at troubleshooting because of a verbose error message, even back in the Windows 95/98 days where you had verbose error messages, most people would still not be capable of understanding them, myself included at that time.
But my point is that the small minority of people who would start troubleshooting the stuff, myself included these days, would be vastly more helped by a verbose error message than a generic “Whops! Something went wrong, please wait!”
Modern software are not even giving people the same initial chances to troubleshoot the issue as older software did.
Oh, on that I totally agree. And not just with Microsoft with everything I run into Microsoft is especially bad because their attitude seems to we need to do something. You don’t need to know what it is and we’re not gonna tell you how long it takes so just fuck right off Which is monumentally annoying of course Apple does give a bunch of code and stuff for errors when something goes wrong and you can send it the developers, and I have never taken the time to try to figure out what any of that stuff is because I am not gonna be able to fix whatever it is and so I’m not gonna take the time. However, in my line of work where I’m supervising a lot of file ingestion people, data, architects, and software engineers, it definitely behooves me to understand what the errors I’m seeing with our own in-house proprietary products are. It’s especially frustrating when some of the higher up software engineers want to exclude me from meetings about the products going down because they claim it’s too technical for me. It’s not, of course, it’s not even the real reason; they just want to exclude me because they’re afraid of sharing their weaknesses or something. I have completely figured out what they are worried about yet, but it’s maddening.
Until you search that error code and it doesn’t tell you anything useful.
Then you ask on a forum and others can help you easier
Also, the total number of Chromebooks sold worldwide is tiny compared with phones and tablets. Most kids have probably never seen a Chromebook, but virtually every kid has held and used a phone, a tablet or both.
If you want to blame Google, blame Android, not Chromebooks.
Yeah Apple was pushing their “BSD for morons” laptops om schools long before chromebooks were a thing.
This is kinda a bad take imo. I don’t think it’s chrome books that has ruined tech literacy. Maybe it’s younger exposure to even more addictive social media than previous generations?
I’m pretty young. My first mobile device was an iPod touch 4th gen. I figured out how to jailbreak it and I was like 12 at the time. If I ever felt one of these walled garden devices was holding me back, I enjoyed finding a creative solution around that. Since that iPod touch, I jailbroke my Wii and recently a kindle. I also modded a gameboy, but that was different than jailbreaking.
Yeah it’s a fucking abysmal take. More kids had access to the internet and computers because of Chromebooks, without them they’d have had nothing - maybe once an hour in the computer lab each week, assuming they even had one.
Prior to Chromebooks, the most a school could do was “a computer in every classroom”. That was it, that was the ambition in the early 2000’s and even then most schools failed.
What happened was tech companies made computers easier to use by hiding a lot of that complexity. And average humans were fine with that because shit should just work.
The arguments being raised here about a loss of skills are the same arguments boomers used against millennials because they didn’t know how to do DIY and shit like that.
The blame is always squarely on the education system. That system is supposed to set kids up with the skills they need to make it in the wold and tech literacy is one of many, many areas that is hugely underserved.
were fine with that because shit should just work.
This was Apple’s literal marketing campaign when they were trying to make Macs popular again
And say what you will about apple, it worked (the slogan, not the Macs)
Before Chromebooks we had one aging computer lab that the entire school had to reserve and share. Kids never even learned to type. I was able to improve students typing ability before they hit High School.
Because we had Chromebooks (that I raised money for with fundraisers) my students were able to learn to use digital data logging of science experiments using probes, my students were able to learn to design websites, I was able to teach them programming basics using Scratch, I was able teach kids basic IT management since I created a team of kids to assist with tech problems students and teachers had with their technology. I taught them CAD with TinkerCAD, I taught them video editing, I taught them image editing, etc.
Chromebooks were amazing.
Not to mention that Chromebooks are Linux (so can be modded for basically anything), but these days have official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please. All it takes is a flashed USB drive and one button click, then you’re totally unrestricted and out of ChromeOS.
If any kid wanted to, they could do that far easier than I could when I was in school. If they become adults, buy a Chromebook, and choose to do nothing with it other than watch YouTube, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the technology that was provided to them during school.
official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please.
I thought you had to remove a write protect screw and flash a custom firmware.
Have they stopped that now?
The school doesn’t let you do that. Because if you installed Linux you could install games, and then you might get distracted. Never mind the fact that YouTube is still completely available.
I looked into this back when I was in school and there was some weird workaround found by someone on reddit that essentially forced it to do a complete factory reset. I didn’t want to get in trouble for doing that, and if I did that I wouldn’t have been able to connect to the wifi anymore.
Do you mean like booting off Linux or installing it? I was looking at installing Linux on Chromebooks and apparently it really depends on the model. Some have a physical screw that you open up the laptop and unscrew to install Linux.
What did you jailbreak your ipod with, though? Was it a chromebook?
Probably windows 🤮
I think there were jailbreaks that could be done on device, but if I remember correctly this wasn’t one of them. I forget the exact year/iOS version. I wanna say I jailbroke 3 iOS versions in a row, and at that point new things had captured my interest. Eventually I found myself captivated with frontend development.
You can find my latest work at https://blorpblorp.xyz/, the obviously best client for Lemmy and soon PieFed.
So you had access to a fairly open device, where the system was considerably less restrictive than a Chromebook. Apparently many first time users don’t have that luxury any longer. They’re stuck with phones and chromebooks (phones with a keyboard slapped on, really). Good luck hacking anything with that locked up shit.
Someone else pointed out it’s not that difficult to boot Linux on your Chromebook off a thumb drive. A quick search shows it might be slightly complicated but seems pretty doable depending on your model.
Listen I hate Google, but this still seems like a dumb take. There are better things to criticize them for: illegal monopolization of search through anticompetitive practices, making their search product worse on purpose, having no respect for people’s privacy, literally removing their slogan to not be evil, etc).
I just see it as another item on a long list.
You know what, we probably agree on most of that list. And I’m happy we have Lemmy.
As I said above, schools don’t let you do that on their Chromebooks. Of course they could provide the same restrictions on other computers probably, so idk if blaming Google is the correct move.
Although they would have to go as far as not allowing any external executables for it to be that locked down.
What are the advantages of a jailbroken kindle? I’ve thought about it but there isn’t really anything I lack on mine.
My motivation was mostly to ditch Amazon, but in the process I discovered ko reader is both better than Amazon’s reader and does a really good job turning PDFs into readable books.
I jailbroke my Wii
Yeah I’ve done this too. Beyond easy. There’s literally a website with step-by-step instructions. I imagine it’s the same for Kindle, etc.
Googling how to jailbreak something is not the same as having an open and functional development environment.
You don’t need to have a dev environment in order to be considered “tech literate”.
Just as a single example, an issue I’ve seen is that kids may not even understand what a file system is or how it works, because they’re used to apps like Facebook or Google Drive which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc. Then they grow up putting photos on instagram, writing essays on Microsoft Word, and to them it’s some unexplained internet magic. They never had first-hand experience with creating and modifying files on a local file system, and so they lack the understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes.
may not even understand what a file system is or how it works … which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc.
What’s funny is, filesystems, folders, file extensions are already abstractions, there is nothing inherently “right” about those particular abstractions, it’s just what we’ve used for 40 some years… Before that, you might just have blocks on a disk, or a linear stream on a tape, and it was up to you to figure out what went where, and how to find it again. Point being, it’s all just a sea of bits, regardless of how you organize them- the goal is to organize them in a way that you can forget the sea of bits.
This is an incredibly dumb take. Tech isn’t one dimensional and there isn’t a “right” path to tech literacy. I grew up on Windows and I learned a lot of what I know by exploring my laptops and learning new things out of necessity. I ended majoring in CS in working in tech. My sister, who’s 5 years younger than me, had Chromebooks growing up both at home and at school, yet she’s also a very proficient CS major. Using Chromebooks doesn’t show that someone is bad at tech, that’s just a baseless assumption.
Chromebooks are just another branch of tech, and there’s really nothing wrong with them. They’re basically Android tablets in laptop form. Google giving them to schools at a deeply discounted price is not a bad thing. Without them, many schools wouldn’t have any sort of tech for their kids to work with. Chromebooks are incredibly useful tools that can enable teachers to incorporate material from the internet into their lessons and help streamline their work.
Hating on things for the sake of hating on them is just lazy and counterproductive. There’s a lot to criticize Google for, Chromebooks are not one of them.
Being a CS major (even a good one) isn’t a solid measure of tech literacy. CS still suffers from the “do this arbitrary thing so you can get credit”; along with other majors and American schools at large.
Actually I’ve seen first hand the dumbing down of curriculum in my CS program via my younger peers’ stories, and helping them with their coursework. And it’s 100% due to low tech literacy.
Edit: grammar.
Not Android, Linux. I was trying to figure out why there are so few Android tablets and read that Google didn’t have complete control with Android. That’s why Samsung and HTC and others put their own overlay on it. They didn’t want that for laptops/bigger devices, so for ChromeOS they locked it down and told the hardware manufacturers “no, it’s ChromeOS. You can’t fiddle with it. If you want to make Chromebooks, these are the minimum specs and this is the keyboard you must use. If not, fuck off.”
These kind of takes have the usual format of “anything a company does is bad” and is profit driven. They forget that there is something called marketing and optics behind it.
First of all, this isn’t enshitification as defined by Corey Doctorow. This has nothing to do with an internet platform getting worse because the priorities of the proprietors changed.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame Google for this. None of these companies do this for entirely altruistic reasons. At the core of the problem is funding in education. Google saw an opportunity and jumped on it. When given a choice that kids get no computer hardware vs. dumping price Chromebooks I would still vote Chromebook. Get your politicians to set aside less money for tanks and more money for education.
Besides, no one is stopping kids from exploring other platforms. Google is looking for an infrastructure lock-in, get them locked in while they are young, but you can go do other stuff. It’s also a question of financial means and interests. And they don’t need to do LAN parties because they already have Fortnite and stuff. Life moves on. Your childhood was also markedly different from your parents’.
The Chromebook does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a cheap notebook which runs Chrome. And it’s fairly competent at that task. It’s exactly as advertised. The problem only arises when people think that the ability to use a Chromebook is acceptable as a substitute for the ability to use a normal computer.
Chromebooks didn’t do shit.
It was tablets and phones replacing the home computer. Apple are equally complicit in this.
I am pretty confident it’s the smartphone OSs (Android and iOS) that are more at fault. I remember having to install a file browser on my smartphone. Kids grown up with smartphones may not even know there are files and folder structures.
Yeah, and I feel like you could play around with javascript to make stuff happen in the browser on a chrome book, can’t you?
I’m old enough that it was BASIC I played around with when I was a kid. Not a language I ever used since, but the important thing is to get a feel for logic, make some incredibly stupid choices when making a program and learn from that. If a kid wants to play around on a computer to make it do something they created, I think they’ll find a way.
Also AI can be helpful when starting on a new language. Yeah I had to learn the hard way by googling stuff and getting the syntax wrong, and using a lot of guess work. There’s still a learning curve before you just know the syntax without stopping to think or asking the AI, but it was that way before, it was just googling things you gotta do before you really know it. And before that a lot more trial and error to figure it out.
This is kind of like blaming car manufacturers for people not knowing how to drive manual and how cars work under the hood, because they made cars reliable and simple to use.
There’s always an incentive to make things more accessible. Skills always become outdated because of that. How many of us know how to skin game and cook it on naked fire? Not many, I presume.
Chromebook for all its flaws and limitations still let children, who would not have otherwise used any computing device, at least use one.
I feel like this analogy is perfect, but not just for the reason you used it.
Car manufacturers making cars easier to use and require less maintenance is great. Your point in regards to people just not needing the old skills because of that is spot on.
But car manufacturers have also been making intentional design decisions to make accessing things under the hood require speciality tools or needlessly complex when it is needed. There are cars where you can’t replace headlights without removing the whole front bumper assembly. That isn’t the fault of the owner/user, and it’s not a case of “improvements make old skills obsolete”. It’s design intentionally hostile to the goal of allowing owners to even attempt it themselves. Scummy as hell, and we should be holding these companies responsible.
Google has done and is doing the same thing with Chromebooks and Android. File system? Folders to organize my files? What?
And now we have people who don’t know how to operate their car’s headlights, and people who can’t find files if they aren’t in the “recent documents” list.
For sure, taking control away from the users is terrible and scummy, but I think it’s an entirely different issue, covered by “right to repair”. A very small amount of people had the know how and the confidence to perform the repairs themselves even before this anti consumer practices became so widespread, so I don’t think it’s a huge factor in decrease of skill. I would say a much bigger factor is the fact that technology has become exponentially more complex. You can’t just open up a radio and replace a vacuum tube, everything is a microchip now, and the soldering iron isn’t gonna help much there. I guess eventually we will reach technology complexity and abstraction of such a level that no single person can hold the knowledge to “fix” it on their own.
Yup. I’m teaching my son CAD/CAM with a 3d printer, low level programming and electronics with Arduino, he helps with mechanical and electrical repairs. Linux with the home server. Fishing, hunting, and camping. Wasn’t ready this year for steers or chickens but hopefully will next year. Wife is teaching him how to cook, (I’m a decent cook, but she is amazing). Simple sewing. Basic carpentry. And so on.
School isn’t going to teach him much of this, but we will.
Wanted to say the same thing you said, but with actual literacy. Books exist, but the desire to be literate is not there.
It’s more like blaming bumper cars for not being actual cars. Sure, bumper cars are more reliable and simple to use but the “use” is severely limited.
No, really, it was corporate social media, and also the smartphone (iphone particularly). They don’t need to know anything anymore thanks to those two. I mean even MySpace had kids learning CSS at least.
“We used to make our own webpages…!”
One of my first exposures to technology was an iPod touch, and I went on to become a software engineer. Maybe it was the time? Perhaps I’ve just become older and grumpier, but technology once felt inviting to me now feels oversaturated and unnecessary. Like do we really need ChatGPT? Does it really make things better or just solve other problems that technology created?
Good, I’m glad nobody is learning these things anymore. I couldn’t care less if someone doesn’t learn HTML and CSS.
Eh, I don’t really agree.
To want to learn something starts with curiosity and the willingness to learn. I was always trying to fuck around with games and programs before I knew that modding was even a thing. When I was met with restrictions I always tried breaking them. I got around admin protection on school computers that literally only had access to the desktop.
My youngest brother on my dad’s side (my family is complicated) is a shut-in who barely acts like the adult he’s supposed to be, never owned a chromebook, and sits in front of the computer more than I even do. He is incredibly tech illiterate.
Yeah it’s a pretty bad take IMHO. When I was a kid we had one 386 desktop computer running MS-DOS. No laptops, phones or tablet. I always liked computers and when I went to high school I noticed a bunch of old broken computers in a storage room one day. Asked the computer teacher (we had computer classes learned MS Word and (blind) typing) if I could try to fix them. Me and a friend spend many luch breaks swapping parts, until about half of them worked again. Learning about something is mostly your willingness to learn. As a highschool kid I would have loved to get a laptop. If I had a Chromebook I’m fairly sure I would have tried to run a custom OS on it or see what else non standard thing I could have unlocked.
If a kid is working with a 600mhz CPU in 2025, what can they realistically do with that Chromebook other than figure out how to get past a firewall? I remember 2nd hand stories of kids bringing in USBs with cracked minecraft or quake, or screwing around with windows themeing and other nonsense. Now, thats gone. You get a browser, and a file manager. No themes, sometimes no access to even change the wallpaper, all in googles little sandbox. I think this post is somewhat accurate but leaves out the role iPhones play in tech ilitteracy
Boomers and Gen X often handed tech problems to their kids, assuming young people just get it. That mindset stuck—tech as an innate skill, not something learned.
Millennials did learn, but by messing around—customizing MySpace, bypassing school filters, using forums. We had to figure it out. Now, everything’s simplified and locked down. Because we’re the ones making a lot of the tech and we’ve figured it out for them. You don’t need to understand the tech we make to use it.
The problem? Older generations think kids will “just get it,” like we did. But no one’s teaching them. We’re giving them phones and tablets, not skills or understanding. We assume either they just get it, or that they’re tinkering around like “we” did.
I’ve found that with my “pre gen x” (born in the 60s, does that make her a boomer?) mother, she seems to have really bought in to all the old “computers make everything easy!” marketing, so when whatever she wants to do isn’t she just kind of gives up. Also ties into her not understanding the value of my career (sysadmin).
To her, computers aren’t complex tools that may take some skills and training to utilize properly, they’re “press the button to make it do exactly what I want” and when that doesn’t work she gets very frustrated.
That, plus she has had just enough exposure to computers in the 90s that she still on some level sees them as very easy to irreperably break expensive luxury items, so when she is rarely willing to work for it then she’s afraid to poke around in menus because she thinks she could break it permanently.
And to be fair, if you don’t set up your laptop using “cattle, not pets” strategies, it can be easy to get four levels deep in a menu and tweak some shit that fucks up an entire program. Then your option is to remember what you did to revert it, or just blow the damn thing out and reinstall (if it actually clears settings on uninstall, not a given).
How old do you think GenX is?! We had the first home computers, learned the PC as it hit the market.
Not OP, but wanted to chime in.
I get the sentiment Some Gen Xers did grow up with home computers. However, I suspect those people are outliers due to both the cost and general user friendlyness. In the late 90s it seemed like everyone had a home computer, even the normies. This let their kids grow up messing around
It almost seems like we’re heading back in this direction, where normies have moved on to phones and tablets because they “just work”. I don’t think the average kid will grow up as immersed in computers as I did unless their parents are intentionally about making that introduction. I bought my kid a used Thinkpad for Christmas last year. Most of his peers have tablets or just stick to their smartphone.
You didnt learn anything hitting the market unless you were well off, significantly.
Computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 weren’t that expensive.
Granted, the original IBM PC was pricy, but it was also targeted at business users.
Not true at all. Most of my friends had less money than we did and we all had a home computer. Obviously not $4,000 IBMs, but we had Atari, VIC-20, TI, Commodore 64, etc. The rich kid had an Apple ][.
I was thinking of my own experiences, but that’s why I said “often.” I personally find that older people who use tech are honestly much better than other generations when it comes to it. My grandma has been into tech from the jump and she blows my mom out of the water when it comes to tech skill. But I find that the ones who were not interested have a hard time catching up. Mostly because it all happened so fast
that’s the problem but the blame can also be squarely placed on us Millennials. Like you said when we were younger and older people had tech issues they’d hand it to us assuming we “get it” but we didn’t. we had to learn it by teaching ourselves. We taught ourselves how to write html, css, etc via Geocities and Myspace. We taught ourselves how to build computers or learned via tv shows like The Screensavers or Call for Help or just by reading PC magazines. AND THEN we decided since we taught ourselves all these solutions and what have you that we’d make it easier for future generations. We developed apps and tools that “just work” no tinkering needed, no customization needed, those are predefined settings. And we’re not teaching kids, we’re providing them with OUR solutions. Like you said we assume they “just get it” because we had to just get it. We didn’t have a choice. If we wanted a custom internet or tech experience we had to do it ourselves.
Today those options are provided because we provided it for them. They don’t need to be as tech literate as we had to be because we made things easier for them.
This seems silly. Lots of kids never learned about computers even when they were available. A chromebook was just an electronic school aid. If the interest was in computers they would learn about computers.
I think this is a fairly dumb take. In the schools that I saw that had chromebooks a kid might be taking English, Math, AND computing. It really was up to the school (and parents) to introduce computing, not the machine that was the general replacement for books.
Anecdotally: a high school near us requires every student to have a computer. They do not hand out chromebooks and the requirement specs are a higher end Mac or PC laptop that the kids are required to bring to classes. These kids use blender, maya 3d, office suite, video and music editing software for example. They absolutely do not know any more about computers then chromebook kids (with a few exceptions). Having access to a computer doesnt magically make them know about how computers work.
The real take is to get kids into PC gaming from a young age. Kids are super patient with each other and now my kid is doing things like installing mods for games that he plays. It’s also massively improved his reading which is mostly how I learned English myself.
I can thank Minecraft for making me learn how to use the computer because I wanted to install mods and for learning English because Minecraft let’s plays were like crack to 10 year old me and basically all of them were in English
That’s awesome, I love hearing stories like this. I was lucky to have access to a PC since I was about 8 years old and computer literacy is probably the most useful skill I have. Nothing teaches PC literacy better than pirating software with complex readmes lol or having to fix the family computer because you infected it with a virus. Had me stressing, looking at the task manager and searching for the origins of every .exe to find the culprit
Probably a great way to get them comfortable with pc hardware too - want that new GPU? Here you go. Install it, you just get the one so be careful and learn how to do it right.
I probably wouldn’t let my son install a GPU until he’s a bit older just because of the cost lol but it is simple enough for a teenager to do, I think.
I feel like this has way more to do with smartphones and apple than chromebooks but sure.
I work in education. The chromebooks at my school replaced the convential computer lab where kids would learn how to actually use the computer.
I graduated highschool in 2014. Very interesting that you think schools taught students how to use a computer beyond opening a browser, Microsoft word, and typing.
At one time, you learned things like what all the parts of a computer are, and what each does.
Wtf was up with microsoft word class? It’s designed for you to learn within 3 weeks. They had children spend 3 hours a week for about a whole year using word.
Like damn, show the other software too. I knew so many science nerds that would appreciate a week of KStars lessons.
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I was suspecting they were indicating iPads
Yeah, my kid’s school has iPads for their technology classes. At least they’re still teaching them the old school internet paranoia I was taught.
Exactly, otherwise this problem would be almost exclusive to places that had this Chromebook program. Brazil as a whole had no such program, yet lots of people have no fucking clue what to do on phones besides “install app, run app”
Yeah a decade ago is not where this problem started. Nothing points to these Chromebooks. Smart phones are a good choice but also just the homogenization of the internet from like 2005-2012 as kids stopped having to figure out how to navigate the internet and install programs, instead staying on two to three websites and everything being installed as an app.
Nah
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of big corporations, but Schools are gonna have to be using Device Management programs regardless of what OS they use (so that kids don’t play video games, or use social media, or watch adult videos, in the classroom). Giving kids a Managed Windows Laptop with tons of restrictions does nothing to “improve tech literacy” either, so just as bad as a chrombook.
Also, wealth is also a factor. If you only have money for one device, and everyone has a smartphone, and you kids are gonna get socially ostricized in school for not having one, of course you’re gonna prioritize giving them a smartphone first, which in turn, delays them learning how to use a computer, and I mean like a computer you actually own and can modify however you want, as opposed to the school-owned managed device. (Its harder to learn that when you’re older)
Ya know they make a valid point. Part of the learning experience growing up and going to school in the 90s and early 00s was figuring out how to bypass the school’s restrictions with proxies, or how to load Quake 2 onto every computer in the district so we could sneak and have little impromptu LAN parties, etc. Hell, one of us got caught hacking into the student records portal to change his grades and after he graduated they hired the kid to work in the IT department. He works for a local ISP now.
Nowadays they don’t know how to use a computer, they just know how to click icons and get apps from sanctioned app stores.
I don’t know where people get this idea from. Kids are still hacking their school computers, just as much as we were back in the 90s. If anything, kids are more knowledgeable on bypassing these systems now than we were then; ask any school’s IT admin, kids are doing wild shit with their computers and tablets.
Don’t forget, people like you and I weren’t “normal kids”. We were a very stark minority. That’s still the case with today’s kids. I think you’re just not seeing it because you either don’t have children in your life that you are in regular communication with, or aren’t present on the social platforms today’s kids are on.
And at the same time large sections of them are as tech illiterate as the boomers. There is a huge divide between the ones hacking everything and those that have only ever used an iPad or similar cloud-based devices and don’t understand how even basics like folder structures works. And they sit right next to each other at school day after day in the same general classes.
That was the case when I was a teen, too
don’t understand how even basics like folder structures works.
Why would they, though? The average user in today’s world doesn’t need that knowledge, just as we didn’t need the knowledge of how punchcards worked (although I think there are a few Lemmings around here who may actually be old enough to qualify). We needed to know how folders work, because that was the norm during our upbringing, but that’s no longer the case.
We didn’t stick to our predecessors’ methodologies. Neither will our successors. They’ll evolve and grow beyond the technology and the norms that we’re familiar with, just as we did with the generation before us.
The average user in today’s world doesn’t need that knowledge.
That’s just factually not true for anyone that works in a medium to large company. Folder structures and network drives are how all company data is handled. The only people at any of our business locations that don’t need to know how that works are the environmental services and food and beverage employees. The rest of the employees absolutely use basic knowledge like that every single day. And not needing that definitely doesn’t apply to any IT adjacent profession, which have expanded dramatically since I was in school.
Folder structures and network drives are how all company data is handled.
Eh, kinda of, but modern enterprise document storage is largely evolving away from it for general business users. I say this as an IT professional that has been an active consumer of the evolution over the last 25 years. Yes, SMB/CIFs/NFS shares still exist in the corporate enterprise, but modern enterprise systems are doing document storage more in Sharepoint, Google Drive, or even object form (storage buckets). All of these last three don’t use a traditional file system where folder (directory really) navigation is a required skill.
This is especially true with Google drive. Yes, there are folders, but its equally likely that the file you need isn’t even in your folders because its been shared to you by another user from one of their folders. Links, bookmarks, and free text file searches are often more useful for locating document that navigating a traditional directory tree. This is somewhat true in Sharepoint too.
Corporate employee here, can confirm. Now you just turn on auto save and forget about it.
Edit: This came off intensely aggressive. Sorry.
I’m looking down the barrel of a massive project to shift all of our departments away from network shares to SharePoint. Simultaneously, my team is going to stop supporting “special” permissioned sub-folders, like share/Facilities/Managers/ so people can’t see their co-worker’s yearly review. Each Sharepoint site’s “owner” (read, department manager) will be responsible for access management in their own site.
Also, knowing some of these departments, they will absolutely run up against the limit on amount of files in a single Sharepoint site. My boss seems to refuse to believe that’s possible.
This is going to be such a clusterfuck. I am afraid.
Original comment:
Sincerely: How the fuck are your users utilizing Sharepoint that they don’t need to navigate the file/folder structure concept? Just using the search bar every time? Maintaining a list of shortcuts or browser favorites?
How does a file being shared from another user’s storage invalidate the need to still know how to get to it?
I can’t speak to Google Drive, as I’ve only used that minorly as an end user. Object based storage is an entirely different use case than document/data organization.
File names and tags with shit chucked in what is effectively a root folder are not adequate for most companies’ data organization and “securing so only the right people have access” needs.
Sincerely: How the fuck are your users utilizing Sharepoint that they don’t need to navigate the file/folder structure concept? Just using the search bar every time? Maintaining a list of shortcuts or browser favorites?
How does a file being shared from another user’s storage invalidate the need to still know how to get to it?
Users are horrible at file management, but you know this part already. When your users have fully evolved away from SMB/NFS shares to Google Drive or Sharepoint it works like this:
User1: “Can you update the financials for your project for this quarter in the file QuarterReporter?”
User2: “Yeah absolutely, where is QuaterReporter?”
User1: “Its in the Reports folder, but theres a few version of it. Don’t use QuaterReporterV1. Use QuaterReporterV1-restored_02-02-23”. Thats one we maintain with current data in it. Here’s the link to the file."
User2: “Uhh, I clicked on that link but don’t have access to it. Can you grant it?”
User1: “Oh sure, let me add you to the doc. There, try it now”
User2: “Yep, that worked. Okay do you just need the financials update one time or would you like me to do that for each quarter ongoing?”
User1: “Ongoing please”
User2: “Okay, I’ll bookmark this file then and use it again in 3 months. Hey, my financials only cover the top of the project, do you want the tactical detail too?”
User1: “I do actually, yes.”
User2: “Okay add, Jim Smith to the doc, and I’ll forward the link you gave of the file to him.”So yes, the file still lives in a folder somewhere, users often don’t even have the right permissions to maintain the folder structure properly and they just route around that by ignoring it and using links, bookmarks, and email forwards of links.
So kids with iphones just download every photo, video, and song they have to one folder and have no way to sort it?
Basically, yeah. Chronological sorting is good enough for most people. As long as you remember when you took the photo, you can find it easily.
Jesus that sounds horrendous. I do the same thing with my phone camera out of laziness, and that’s bad enough. I can’t imagine every file I have being accessible based on my memory of timeline.
I do this on purpose. I much much prefer chronological sorting and metadata search than actually organising files as long as it’s faster and works correctly.
Even with actually manually organized file storage ultimately I just end up with folders more based on chronology than anything else.
The way I see it - the only actually practical reason to have folders is if there is logic applied to the files, like e.g. all files in folder X get mounted as a docker volume in program Y or backed up to server Z etc etc.
Beyond that all I care about is that my files are actually appropriately indexed and accessible quickly on-demand exactly when I want and how I want both at work and at home.
Same way how I don’t actually go to /bin/ and list the dir and find the program, I hit Win+D in i3 and just type in what I want to run and get the program.
My one pet peeve though is when devs use this to organise an app’s files like a tornado organizes a goddamn county fair, my ~/ is chock-full of random dotfiles and dotfolders of dotfiles without clear purpose or use and the state of C:\Users\whatever is a lovecraftian horror once you had the same general use Windows install for a few years, god forbid making sense of AppData and whatnot. And it gets so much worse with distro standards evolving to conf.d folders rather than one dotfile per program/daemon which just makes it hard to get an accurate full picture of things.
Fucking Kali of all things is such a bitch for adding
splashto boot prams outside of /etc/default/grub in its goddamn theme script of all places. I use this OS for pentesting practice/learning (and gaming). I do not want fancy boot. I do not want arbitrary, potentially crippling boot options silently added to my grub in files that have no business doing so or really even being a default inclusion no matter how ‘pretty’ and ‘modern’ the result. I am trying to learn deobfuscating JS, not my own goddamn configs, not that the latter isn’t useful but it feels hostile and anti-human to sacrifice simplicity for elegance.
How many kids are you exposed to? I think you’ve made up quite a story with a giant brush here.
I don’t work with kids children, but that’s not what I claimed either, I was talking about Zoomers being as tech illiterate as the Boomers. I work frontline IT support, so everyone down to those right out of high school and entering the workforce at a business with locations statewide. So firmly working with Gen Z entering the workforce now and through the last decade. Current Zoomer ages range from about 13-28, I’d say that’s enough time and breadth to have a relatively decent sample size for an unscientific comparison like this.
I’ve managed MSP teams supporting 1000 ish users.
You’re just letting biases affect your perception. The vast majority of adults use osx and Windows just fine.
Basically this. None of our parents knew we were dumpster diving telephone exchanges or trying to figure out gaining root on server systems. Today’s underground is equally obfuscated by the “don’t tell the grown ups” as we were.
My first computer was a DOS machine at the age of 5, and I grew up along side the PC, learning each iteration of operating system in real time as they were released. I have a hard time imagining anyone ever getting that good a window into how computers work, passively, just from using them normally. All the weird shit I did was entirely on top of what was already a rock solid foundation.
Just wish a social life hadn’t been the sacrifice paid for that education.
I still did that in the 2010s tbh. Though I was a dying breed admittedly
I use the old chrome book I have for writing. It was pretty easy to throw Linux on there. Was cheap when I bought it years ago, and still has like 10 hours of battery life. Just don’t expect it to do much other than text processing and simple Web stuff.
If I remember correctly, they’re all core-boot-able, which is neat. Can’t do that with most other laptops.
Like, I see the problem, but my school actually gave out iPads, which I feel was worse. On the chrome book, you can at least access the file system and Linux.
