quyksilver

@quyksilver

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Chinese Jewish furry herm foxtaur trans lesbian Hank Hill, aspiring anaesthesiologist

Show love and kindness to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.

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SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

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

SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

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

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in reply to @SomeEgrets's post:

JillieDaw
@JillieDaw

fully agree with this considering the first week after any time i install windows is taken up by going through registry and group policies etc with a knife to make things work the way i want them to and remove any features i'm not a fan of

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SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

the registry editor has got to be like, the perfect example of cursèd windows deep magic that's just as awful an experience to use as any linux sysfs nonsense, but it's just taken for granted because of decades of That's How You Do Things

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/{unintelligable string of random uuid letters}/CurrentControlSet/000001/The_setting_you_are_actually_looking_for

Maybe slight hyperbole, but try explaining all of this to someone who isn't already familiar with it.

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JillieDaw
@JillieDaw

from what i can tell from looking things up while doing this, if you go to a forum trying to get help about that kind of registry entry you get yelled at by someone who says they're from microsoft telling you you're too Stupid to use this setting or to understand what it does (it's probably something like web search in your local search), and get banned for harrassment if you say that wasn't a helpful answer

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