Agreed on the sugarcoating. My mother installed Windows 11 on a lab computer and had to call me for tech support for the first time in 20 years because she couldn't figure out how to do the most basic things. This is a PhD physicist who has been programming Fortran and Python since the 1990s and taught her parents how to use Ubuntu as their daily driver, yet she was completely stumped by Windows 11. It's been a daily struggle for her since.
Sadly all I could say was "yeah, that's why I use Linux"
It seems like it's just a part of aging, sadly. My dad was using computers at MIT back in the 60s before hardly anyone else had ever seen one. I had access to a computer at home my entire life even though the most basic monochrome green PC compatible was $10k in today's money [1], and I remember him using an acoustic coupler modem to connect to some network (a BBS?) at triple digit baud through the actual telephone handset, long before the World Wide Web even existed.
And yet now ... he barely does anything with computers besides play freemium mobile games on his phone. Doesn't email too much anymore, doesn't have online logins to just about anything (like his bank accounts), and can't handle basic debugging of tech issues anymore. I think people just give up at some point and stop trying to stay current with this stuff.
> I think people just give up at some point and stop trying to stay current with this stuff.
Or, they realize that 90% of it adds zero value to their lives. When you get older, you really do start thinking about how fast the years went by and how they are going to be gone before you know it, and do you want to spend any significant fraction of that time sitting at a computer, yet again wasting hours on "debugging tech issues" that a 20-something developer in California or Oregon has yet again foisted upon the world.
Also as you get older you have figured out that if you don't want to do something, you just pretend you don't know how, and eventually someone else will do it for you.
Not having online access to any of his financial institutions is actually causing real problems though, as is being unable to get a response from him on texts/emails.
As a younger person I’d say I really enjoy debugging tech issues, enough that I actually go out of my way to do it for other people (active on support forums etc).
That’s a lot of the reason why I run Linux actually
I'm so sorry that your poor mother had to install Windows on a lab computer. I'm guessing there was a specific piece of hardware in the lab that only works with some shitty Windows-only control software, huh?
