my entire contribution to people yelling about desktop operating systems is that there are no good desktop operating systems, they are all haunted and broken in some ways and you've just picked one and used it long enough that you've got habits about it now and got used to the ways the particular one you chose is broken

nobody knows how to use these things intuitively! it's all metaphors for metaphors for UI widgets based on a developer's interpretation of a designer's vision, implemented poorly by burnout programmers who barely understand how they work and don't care about anyone's vision because they're two years into crunch time

none of this shit is good, you just develop enough very specific brain poison for one of them because you picked it and used it for a decade

corollary - this year, we have the first students i've ever encountered in our research who probably have never used windows before

one of them didn't know what i meant by the "start menu" and another was totally lost when i said to navigate to a drive letter¹

this isn't a dunk on them (i don't think you should ever dunk on someone for not knowing a computer thing) but more likely, they're just part of a generation who was actually able to escape orbit from windows dominance over home computing

it's not hard to imagine - macbooks are sleeker and sexier and the windows laptop experience is so miserable². your phone isn't running windows. your school probably gave you chromebooks to work on

which just kind of drives home how arbitrary it all is and how much rests on what is the thing you learned on and got familiar with

1. windows is actually kind of the odd one out here. nobody else does drive letters. if your experience is on literally any other system, the entire concept of drive letters is foreign. it's super reasonable that someone would not have bumped into this metaphor before

2. dunno if it's improved but for the longest time, buying a windows laptop meant you were getting half your hard drive preinstalled with shitty bloatware and helpers and half functional previews of software that would nag you to buy them, and the hardware integration was often not great

i'm not sure that being unfamiliar with windows conventions (because you learned on another OS) really says much about any of the students' computer skills. and in fact, once you cut through the unfamiliar OS conventions, and get them able to work, many of them are able to immediately start work in writing python, or data analysis tasks

but in general, i would expect science students to have a better than average computer literacy because this is a technical field that specifically uses those skills

THAT SAID...

you're absolutely right about the level of computer literacy among extremely average people who aren't computer-touchers and don't need a particularly in-depth knowledge for their work or hobbies

this is actually kind of reflected perfectly this OECD study summarized by Jakob Nielsen, and extremely important to keep in mind if you're ever in a position where you work on anything user-facing, i think

caveats that it's OECD and likely targeted mostly to evaluate people's ability to work, so those are things to keep in mind, but the takeaway is that so, so many people see computers as a machine they operate by following a set of exact memorized steps to perform a specific task, and that's it

they're not viewing computers as a metaphor for anything and not really thinking about how information is presented and how tasks and actions are abstracted and presented

to your extremely average user, a computer is not a general purpose machine built on consistent abstractions and conventions that can be understood and reasoned about, it's a machine that performs a task. you memorize how to make the machine perform that task and that's all you need to do

i need to absolutely stress that i'm not saying any of this in a derogatory tone. why would you waste your life knowing way too much about these godawful, horrible machines if you could avoid it, right? and this level of understanding is not an outlier, it's incredibly normal

this is part of why i rail against unnecessary UX changes for absolutely no reason other than to change things so they're different enough to earn someone a promotion. every time you do that, you're breaking someone's memorized workflow. you do this often enough and they're going to develop a sort of learned helplessness about it - things are always changing, which "breaks" their computer because they can't do their tasks on it anymore, they usually blame themselves for not understanding, and eventually they just learn that they can't understand or operate these things and become afraid to touch anything that isn't exactly how they expect it

i've directly seen this with my mom, who used her
computer to do small business accounting (which is something i definitely can't do!) - but anytime a dialog box or error message she wasn't expecting showed up, she would have to stop work and go get someone (usually me) to look at it