Conversation

@hans @matrix @Mastodon @Tutanota @nextcloud I think you have pretty well summarized the situation. I mean, I've been using computers since the late 1970's and still I will almost always go for the easy solution rather than the "right" one. I don't want to have to thing about how things work. I don't want to read documentation. I don't want my computer to present me with challenges or puzzles that need to be solved. If I install a piece of software and can't get it working withing five minutes, or if it is giving me error messages, I am calling it a piece of sh!t and maybe silently cursing the developers who came up with this monstrosity, and I am probably looking for some other alternative.

The whole original promise of computers was that they would make life easier, but instead I find too many hours and days and weeks and even months of my life have been spent trying to make a computer do something that should have been easy, or trying to figure out why this damn software is giving me an error, or why the fucking developers had to go and change a perfectly working piece of software in a way that now certain functionality I depended on no longer exists, or that made the software stop working entirely (and also decided to remove all the previous versions of the software from their repository, as just a little extra "fsck you" to their users).

So at this point in my life, yes, I just want things to be easy. Every now and and then I still think about going to Bluesky, just because Mastodon has too many strange quirks and annoyances, but at this point at least I know how to use it so I am in no big hurry. But using Mastodon as an example, I could not care less HOW it works, only whether I am able to read the posts I might be interested in.

I think developers and Linux experts do not understand, and do not really WANT to understand, the mindset of the vast majority of computer users. To users the computer is just a tool. How many consumers buy products and use them until they break because they don't know the first thing about maintenance? If a product tells you somewhere in the instructions that you must put a drop of oil in some hole occasionally to prolong the product's life, you probably couldn't fill a thimble with the amount of oil that actually gets put in that hole by purchasers of that product. Instead they will complain about how that company's sh!tty products just don't last, and will buy a different brand next time.

Developers and Linux experts (and I know we are not specifically talking about Linux here, but this could apply to just about and kind of computer expert) tend to have much better memories than the average person (for example, it's hard to be a good programmer or system administrator if you can't remember things like programming language commands and syntax, or how to perform certain administrative tasks) but also I think they tend to enjoy challenges and puzzles much more than the average person. They don't immediately get frustrated when something doesn't work. As an analogy, they are more like the type who, if they bought a brand new car and the next morning it didn't start, would be more likely to crack the hood and try to figure out what the problem is, whereas the average person would more likely call the dealer to complain and maybe tell them to come and get this piece of sh!t car.

And no, we do not have the same mentality that we did in the days of the Model T. My dad grew up in that era, and he very much was the type that if his car broke down on the side of the road, he's crawl underneath it and try to fix . And it frustrated him that in that same situation his son's response was to call a tow truck and have the car towed to the nearest service station (back when such places still existed). But I knew nothing about cars, and didn't want to know anything about them other how to make them get me where I wanted to go. Then a few short years later he became frustrated that he could no longer fix his own car because now they had added all this "new crap" that he could not understand, such as pollution controls and electronically controlled parts of the engine. And similarly, when I was younger and home computers were relatively new I was more willing to deal with the challenges (even in pre-Internet days) but I now feel the same way about computers as my dad did about cars; now pretty much everything seems far too complicated, and at this point in my life, complicated is the last thing I want! And kids today never really had to know anything about computers, their phones are their computers and for them everything is an app that comes from their phone maker's walled garden. I imagine when they get older even installing and setting up apps may be too much of a challenge. And I don't think Covid has done anything to improve the overall intelligence level (but then again my generation dealt with widespread asbestos and lead and pesticide and chemical exposure, so it is always something).