I played education games on a Apple II in 1998; I was in the first grade.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Year of birth matters a lot for this experiment.
Macintosh versus some IBM (or clone) running MS DOS is a completely different era than Windows Vista versus PowerPC Macs, which was a completely different era from Windows Store versus Mac App Store versus something like a Chromebook or iPad as a primary computing device.
I suddenly vividly remember putting my mom’s Chromebook into developer mode and installing crouton on it so I could play Minecraft.
Linux users are inherently more tech savvy because there are no limits. On the contrary, there is documentation and free knowledge aplenty. Windows and especially Mac hide and obfuscate everything happening under the hood and you are vaguely warned away from doing anything not specifically blessed by the corporation. That's why those users are less tech savvy on average.
Don't jerk yourself off too hard for using linux
Yeah, leave some spunk for the rest of us!
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I agree there is an obfuscation of what is happening under the hood in Windows and Mac systems- but that doesn't stop the tech savvy from digging a bit further. I played around with resource files back in my System 6, 7, and 8 days, and got pretty comfortable with registry edits from Windows 95 onwards.
I think it's more that Linux only appeals to the tech savvy, precisely because of the lack of that obfuscation layer.
Just the fact that someone is using Linux at all means they are probably tech savvy, simply for the fact they had to install it in their own. If all prebuilds came with Linux, it would likely be the other way around. (Although why someone would, out of free will, go and install Windows is beyond me)
Interestingly people who learned to use PCs back in the early days most likely installed themselves Windows on their own MS-DOS PCs and probably also upgraded it themselves, whilst Mac users did not.
Which kinda gives weight to the idea that it's the technical barrier to entry into using a certain OS that makes for tech savvy users of that OS: they had to be tech savvy already (or at least have the mindset of trying stuff out which is IMHO what creates tech savvy users) in order to get that OS running.
...because it's the easiest OS to install and use?
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I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It's not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.
Well you have access to a lot of the same CLIs that Linux users get, right?
I'm not a fan, but I know a handful of professional developers who main apples.
Yeah, Apple computers are disproportionately common at tech conferences and meetups.
I'm a backend dev and the last 3 companies I've worked for are exclusively apple only. It feels, to me, like apple took over US tech startups. Obviously pretty poor sample size.
My anecdotal observation is the same. Most of my friends in Silicon Valley are using Macbooks, including some at some fairly mature companies like Google and Facebook.
I had a 5-year sysadmin career, dealing with some Microsoft stuff especially on identity/accounts/mailboxes through Active Directory and Exchange, but mainly did Linux specific stuff on headless servers, with desktop Linux at home.
When I switched to a non-technical career field I went with a MacBook for my laptop daily driver on the go, and kept desktop Linux at home for about 6 or 7 more years.
Now, basically a decade after that, I'm pretty much only driving MacOS on a laptop as my normal OS, with no desktop computer (just a docking station for my Apple laptop). It's got a good command line, I can still script things, I can still rely on a pretty robust FOSS software repository in homebrew, and the filesystem in MacOS makes a lot more sense to me than the Windows lettered drives and reserved/specialized folders I can never remember anymore. And nothing beats the hardware (battery life, screen resolution, touchpad feel, lid hinge quality), in my experience.
It's a balance. You want the computer to facilitate your actual work, but you also don't want to spend too much time and effort administering your own machine. So the tradeoff is between the flexibility of doing things your way versus outsourcing a lot of the things to the maintainer defaults (whether you're on Windows, MacOS, or a specific desktop environment in Linux), mindful of whether your own tweaks will break on some update.
So it's not surprising to me when programmers/developers happen to be issued a MacBook at their jobs.
I'm pretty old an have been working in IT for almost 20 years now. Back in the day in would be more like this "hey welcome to the team, here's your PC". Someone would point to a desktop with Windows (XP) on it. If your company was "good" at IT you would have roaming profiles, so you could use any desktop with your own profile. If you would get a laptop (usually if you did IT consultancy that would be the case) it would be some locked down version of Windows where you would not even have admin rights.
In one of my first jobs a colleague (developer) couldn't do his job because his pc was so slow and locked down. One day he came into the office with a CD-ROM that had Ubuntu on it. He just wiped the desktop and installed it. As a young office worker I was shocked! You can do that???
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I'm currently training a new employee who comes from the "My school handed out Chromebooks" generation, and hol...eee...shit... Its frustrating as hell.
Literally every single instruction gets followed up with "no...double click"
FML
I am that generation, but I was blessed enough (not dirt poor) to have a family Windows PC at home, and my mom got me a HP laptop later because she knew I was gonna be going to a tech school program in my Junior year, and knew that Chromebooks were dogshit.
My tech teacher would constantly complain about the kids who had like zero Windows knowledge, and couldn't do shit like open a PDF in word, or simply find the terminal. I knew this shit would happen when I was in school, I literally told my mom that anyone who can't afford a windows device at home is fucked in the work environment. Compounded by the fact most teens are iPhone purists and make fun of Android, they're just too used to "shit just works"
open a PDF in word
Hmm.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/opening-pdfs-in-word-1d1d2acc-afa0-46ef-891d-b76bcd83d9c8
Word can open PDFs in word for editing them.
It's honestly more intuitive than opening then with the internet browser (edge).
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My family’s first computer was a 68k Mac, specifically a Quadra 605. I tried (and failed) to teach myself C++ using that system at the tender age of 9, but eventually moved over to Windows PCs. Had a Linux-based web server running on spare parts as a teen, though, and did succeed at teaching myself PHP and later Python well enough to hack together my very own blog software. Not very good blog software, mind you, but the critical thing was that it worked! Even spent a few years as and SMB sysadmin even though my degree is in [building] architecture.
Since then I’ve drifted away from the very deep end of tech world, but I would never say that first Macintosh stunted my skill.
(100% autistic tho, so ymmv)
I grew up with mac, but I was always so frustrated that I couldn't play the games and run the programs my friends could on their computers. I finally bought my own PC in high school, and was so happy to have the control I always wanted. I haven't switched to Linux yet, but at this point it's inevitable; I'm just dragging my feet on figuring it out.
Download VirtualBox, its free and open source. Download a few Linux isos, actual Linux isos, and fire them up in a VM to see what sticks out to you. People usually recommend Mint As a bridge from Windows, personally I'm liking PopOS a lot more than I thought I would. Both are based on Ubuntu which is ubiquitous. I hear a lot about immutable distros, but I haven't ventured there yet. Point is you can figure it out for free and completely without hassle.
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My father made me figure out how to compile Linux drivers for a modem card before I could have internet.
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Tbf installing linux is not that hard
Back in the day when installing Solaris and OpenBSD and such you had to specify in numerical values the number of sectors of hard disk space you wanted to format drives with. Shit is considerably easier now with modern UNIXy systems.
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Some people are just naturally computer savvy. My class and I were taught on how to use command prompt, but only few of us could get it. We just wanted to play Command and Conquer and DOTA, and leave the tweaking to the nerds.
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1st ever system I played on was an Apple II. And my older gen X brother had an Odyssey 2, a Commodore 64, and later I messed with a bunch of pre-Windows DOS systems via home and school computer lab playing and screwing around with games made in BASIC.
Then we got a Mac OS 7 system at home thanks to my teacher parent getting a grant for a Mac computer (Performa 550) for their classroom.
From there on out, I meandered back and forth between Mac and Windows.
Now I have a desktop with Win10, a Steam Deck, and my spouse’s desktop I just installed Bazzite on to let her play games and act as a trial run for changing my own to some flavor of Linux before Windows shuts things down in October.
No autism diagnosis. Just an elder millennial lucky enough to get a lot of experience with a lot of different computers at a young age.
Was taught using Apple2 then Macs in Jr High.
I built my own PC in high school (late 90s), upgraded it through college, then switched back to Mac’s when they went Intel.
I can’t muddle through Ruby, Python, Perl, Php C/C++, Objective-C and Swift. But wrote Actionscript, JS, and HTML/CSS for a living for 15 years.
How you start doesn’t matter and Mac’s are still better than Chromebooks. They have Unix shells FFS.
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Lemmy Linux bros make me avoid Linux at all costs
Letting other people make decisions for you like that is weak-willed. My interest in things is intrinsic and isn't affected by external factors, yours should be too
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I've been using pop OS for 5 years and barely understand anything at all, we're not all super nerds. I got it to save a bit of upfront money on a new build with the plan to buy windows when I needed it, never needed it.
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