Rule

Bigger distinction: Kids with computers vs. kids with “smart” devices.
- I feel that is the difference we're seeing though. Younger kids who generally live on smart devices have lower tech literacy.
  
  And apple phones are "smart devices"

She must have had a Mac. Only Windows teaches both the knowledge and the fury to convince children to switch to Linux.
- Switching from apple is like breaking out of prison.
  
  Coming from windows it’s a breath of fresh air
  
  Real question, what things on Apple were so restrictive that you think it’s a prison?
  
  With iPhones yeah, but MacOS is not very locked down at all. You can run all the unsigned code you want.
  Although you could argue the new Apple Silicon Macs are kind of locked down, since Apple only allows kernel extensions on the older Intel Macs
  
  it's always puzzled me why Apple themselves call installing non approved software "jailbreaking", they're straight up stating that their os is a jail
- I don't know. I think Mac gets a lot of hate simply because it's a Unix that was sold to the devil and comes with a satanic concierge service.
  Like, I'm not saying that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if I had to pick a handful of people that on the whole I would say probably did I would pick Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon musk, Jeffrey bezos, Larry Page, Vladimir Putin, and probably every Hollywood social elite and musician that sells a platinum record, every Republican senator, congress person, and every president after Jimmy Carter, and every CEO whose company is worth more than 10 million dollars who didn't inherit the company from their parents.
  
  Don't forget Robert Jordan
- growing up my family had a mac desktop that i had access to while really young. eventually realized mac is a little terrible, so i tried bootcamp to get some proper use out of the computer. i successfully installed windows, but somehow fucked up and formatted the mac partition. all for windows to also suck
  
  What did your parents do?
- Eh, I grew up with Macs, but I couldn't afford a Mac for my first computer, or even a windows license. I got a computer from a family friend that was broken which I fixed up and installed Linux on.
- This isn't right at all... Mac's are awful if you want to do things like play most video games. Linux is much the same.
  That's right. I said it. Come downvote me, fanboys, I don't mind. I've seen what makes you cheer.
  
  Most video games work perfectly in Linux now...
  
  Proton is way better than whatever thing Apple has going on (didn't they say they were working on their own proton-like thing? did they just forget about it? I remember seeing a video with some sort of dev preview a while ago...)

When I was 12 I installed Linux... and now I have autism. And I'm gay!
- That's like half the fediverse here
- We get it, you use Arch.
- Gaytism
- There's truly not individual unique experiences.
  
  Well there's a simple explanation right? When you're growing up grappling with issues like homosexuality, disability or just feeling like an outsider - spending more time at a computer provided an escape from a judgemental and unwelcoming world. This is the same reason so many of us are night owls well into adulthood, cause we grew up feeling safer when the adults were asleep and we could maintain our personal boundaries.
- I'm autistic and gay but I also have a secret third thing that stopped me from figuring out linux. The "AD" in ADHD (there needs to be a better way to distinguish between having attention deficit, hyperactivity, or hybrid). I have tried like four times now to figure out linux and my brain just doesn't get the dopamine it needs from that activity and I just can't focus 🫠
  
  There is a shoet way to say it: Inattentive type (type I), Hyperactive type (type H), and Combination type (type C)
  I routinely describe myself as ADHD type C
  
  There is a way to distinguish them ! There is Innatentive type, Hyperactive-impulsive type and Combined type
  
  It looks like Linux got much friendlier as of lately, and requires much less figuring out, but ymmv and you can of course run into issues, unfortunately.
  Nowadays we usually have the benefit of being connected to the internet from something other than the computer we're fiddling with, it was quite hard to troubleshoot modem issues when you need that modem to work for the internet connection.
- Weird flex, but ogay.

Personally, I guess that you learn more the more issues you have. MacOS is a more closed down ecosystem compared to Windows, malware is less popular and as hardware comes usually bundled with the OS, you shouldn't encounter as many driver or hardware issues in general.
As a kid I had so much trouble with incompatible software, viruses, adware, drivers, broken hardware etc. And as I had noone to ask, it tought me a lot about the fundamentals of IT and how to research such issues myself.
- Counterpoint, I grew up at a time when Mac's still couldn't do much outside of what apple specifically developed for them, so I learned a ton about emulation and virtual machines and such to play games or use Photoshop. I guess that supports your hypothesis, I can rock Unix command line stuff and containers like a pro, but hate figuring out drivers
  
  Yes, I completely see that. This is not a black or white question. You can use Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS... and learn close to nothing or you can geek around hour after hour to expand the boundaries of your device.
  I would just assume, that you learn less if everything you want to do, works out of the box. And 'working out of the box' a typical selling point of the Apple ecosystem. Which of course doesn't mean that you can't have a steep learning curve. Your use cases obviously weren't delivered out of the box, so you had to get creative as well.
  I had a jailbroken iPod Touch with a shell on it and spend hours and days overcoming system boundaries just out of spite. I also remember vividly trying to bring mobile games to a Symbian phone, tweaking around with a HP iPAQ on Windows Mobile, manually typing Midi ringtones with a text editor on a Nokia. :D
  
  And then there's 90s Linux because your parents got a used computer with a friend that came with only that and they didn't want to spend money buying windows 😢 it's like learning to swim by being yeeted into the ocean, with a couple sharks hanging around.
  At least 80s kids got assembly.

At risk of going off topic, I don’t like Twitter posts like this:
Both users ‘verified,’ essentially paying for more engagement, but with no actual “verification” like community mods tagging users.
In your face engagement metrics all over the posts, as if that’s all that matters. Not even a user “poll” like Lemmy/Reddit or Mastadon/Facebook.
Hiding most replies other than the most algorithmically engaging ones.
Posted as a screenshot, unfortunately necessary as they essentially broke Nitter and it’s nigh unusable unless logged in.
I don’t like that the Twitter format is kinda the center of the social media universe, and seemingly staying that way now that we basically voted to back it with the US govt.
- Move back to Tumblr
  
  You joke (maybe), but Tumblr’s sharing mechanics are relatively healthy.

Hey! 🙋 I'm an autistic person (diagnosed at age 3). I grew up using Mac computers mostly, because my father preferred them for his work. Although I would encounter Windows a lot when I was at school as well. However, I didn't really know how to use Windows until I started seeing videos on YouTube about it (such as this one). This was when I was around 10. So I started experimenting with different editions of it (Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows XP, etc.) via a pirated copy of Parallels Desktop. I also found out about Linux, and toyed with Ubuntu with a bit via Parallels. I found it fun, and thus considered the idea of installing Linux properly onto my Macbook. Unfortunately, the trackpad support wasn't there. So for my 11th birthday, I asked for a "Windows laptop", and immediately after getting it, I set up some dual-boot with Windows 10 and some fork of Ubuntu called "Pinguy OS". (I spent way too much time looking at DistroWatch.) Then, I distro-hopped for a bit until I finally settled on Void Linux when I was 13. I'm now 18 and am running Void full-time on my current laptop, it doesn't even have a Windows partition. :)
- Awesome! What made you pick void?
  
  Apologies for the late reply, my internet went down for a day. Anyway, before I was using a distro called Antergos (basically Arch with an easy installer and a few custom packages). When it was discontinued, some people waited for what is basically its spiritual successor, EndeavourOS. Others switched to using vanilla Arch. But I decided to use Void after some research, as to me it was Arch but with a few advantages to my favour:
  At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn't (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now, archinstall exists, I guess.
  It's still rolling-release, so you can update whenever you want easily, but at the same time not bleeding-edge, so packages don't break as easily.
  Unlike most Linux distros, it uses runit as the init system instead of systemd. I'm no rabid systemd hater, but you gotta admit that runit is just easier to learn how to use.
  And finally, by adopting a non-major distro, I just wanted to promote Linux apps being compatible with as many distros as possible, and not just either Debian, Fedora, or Arch (or whatever derivatives exist thereof).
  (Also, happy cake day! I didn't know Lemmy had cake days until now hehe :)
- Yooo, another autistic geek 2006er!
  I was diagnosed at age 4 and i started with Flash games on a Windows 7 family desktop. The first PC i could keep in my bedroom was an old netbook with XP and Lubuntu gifted to me by my mom(i only used the linux part tho). Then, later, another XP-era laptop with Linux Mint, before the current win10 laptop i have today(used it with Windows so far cuz i'm lazy and i used to need windows software but i plan to Linuxize this as soon as win10 is discontinued)
  When i take the jump i'm prolly gonna settle for KDE Neon or any other Debian-based that can run KDE and then try to theme it to get something as close to Frutiger Aero as possible.
  
  Ayy! 🤝
  I'm also thinking of trying KDE the next time I install Linux. I've been using GNOME for the vast majority of my time on Linux, though I've also dabbled with Xfce and Antergos' built-in OpenBox configuration for a short while.

The weird thing is that the UNIX core of MacOS would lend itself really well to tinkering. It's a shame that Apple lobotomizes all the hardware they sell with locked down firmware...
- It's why I much prefer MacOS over Windows. The command line makes sense. The file and folder structure makes sense. The defaults can be a little bit weird but a little configuration can help me feel right at home.
- Ironically, I found macOS to be a lot more technical than Windows. It's how I got my start with Linux. At least changing the default browser changes the default browser. I'll be using macOS and Linux side by side.

I'm genuinely curious; is her hypothesis that macOS users are less tech literate? Because I definitely know much more computer science people that use macOS than Windows (of course most use Linux, but Windows is on third place).
- I don't understand the correlation with technical people on Mac. Like I DONT GET IT 😭
  how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want? I tried to use a cracked iPhone before deciding just to buy a new android because I just bout exploded with the corporate shenanigans apple has.
  Edit: It would appear that Mac is very different from IOS. Ive never tried it other than 15 minutes of fiddling with a friends once, nice to know it's not as locked down as IOS is.
  Many thanks, but I hardly understand this conversation lol
  
  Macs have a decent terminal + CLI interface built in, and decent hardware. Also, for many years apple offered huge discounts for students through their university, so many CS students got a macbook for super cheap and just never stepped out of the ecosystem.
  
  OS X and iOS are completely different beasts, iOS is a closed off nightmare whereas OSX is basically just stable pretty Linux missing a few packages and costing more
  
  The fact I had to use iTunes to put music on my phone and the lack of access to the filesystem were extreme deal breakers for me. There is also the impossible hoops you had to jump through to change ownership of a phone. I gave my mother my old iPhone when I changed to Android and it was impossible to scrub my account from it, even with a factory reset.
  The environment felt way too sterile for my liking. It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.
  
  For tech people, OS X is basically a BSD with a pretty UI that comes preinstalled on nice hardware (which is important mainly because corporate IT procurement is only gonna give you a choice between a Mac or a [Dell|HP|Lenovo] business-line machine running Windows (and with corporate policy that prohibits installing Linux). The Mac is a much nicer choice in that situation.
  Also remember that, although they've backed away from it now, there was a time back in the 2000s when Apple was leaning into the UNIX hackability of the OS -- they were coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator and went out of their way to design their machines for toolless upgrades of things like RAM. Some of the popularity of Macs among technical people stems from that era, and memories of it.
  iOS, by the way, has always been an entirely different story. Your experience with a cracked iPhone isn't even slightly representative of the experience using an OS X Mac.
  
  I use a Mac precisely because it lets me do what I want. Linux is endless configuration and poorly designed UIs, Windows is an incoherent mess that needs to be wrestled back to a usable state with every major update. Mac does what I need without any fuss.
  Truth be told, I have a PC for gaming and a Linux server for Plex, *arr, and home automation. But when I need to get work done, it’s the MacBook. No question.
  
  Because it's Unix, and Windows isn't, and they refuse to try Linux because it's ~~not backed by a corporation~~ too much of a headache to use day-to-day
  
  how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want?
  Huh? What do you mean?
  
  What stuff do you think you can’t do on Mac? It’s essentially just Linux with better (and more supported) apps.
  
  I’m always confused by people who don’t seem to understand that MacBooks and iPhones run different OSs. Why would they run the same OS?
  You can install pretty much anything on a MacBook via the open-source package manager brew. I’ve been exclusively using Linux at home for almost 20 years, but on my work computer, which is a MacBook, I really don’t find much is missing. I use the same oh-my-zsh profile on both, brew install the real version of most utilities, and I move on with my life and get work done.
  Apple doesn’t lock down the bootloader at all, so it’s trivial to install Asahi Linux now if you want to. I did this on my home computer because I like the screen, battery life, and keyboard layout.
  
  It’s kinda simple actually. As much as I love patching the Linux kernel or debugging it, or anything really it takes a lot of the one resource in life I have less of each day, time. Generally on macOS I can just upgrade and not bother worrying about breakage. Not always sure but if you’ve ever had to deal with python libraries or c libraries and updating source you start to go if I’m not getting paid for this crap why bother.
  My entire network is almost all Linux but I generally just use macOS mostly cause safari battery life is insane. Plus zsh as my shell I live in the terminal and use emacs I can pretty easy migrate off either but video apps and audio are so much better on macOS it’s not even funny. Maybe now that the realtime kernel patches are in mainstream Linux audio can get closer to macOS audio latency but I won’t hold my breath.
  I can’t speak to windows though I don’t really use it outside of work related usage which is minimal as I work for a company that sells a Linux distribution.
- Could be, could also be she is generally actually curious about it. I would actually think its the opposite since your problem solving skills are exercised more on a windows than a mac. Computer science people will engineer a solution from the ground up while the rest of us will problem solve and be happy with something held together with duct tape.
  
  I think computer science is related to problem solving though. Especially programming is just basically solving one new problem after another and being able to figure out new solutions to errors you don't know.
- I think that's the gist of it. Apple is so hell bent on proprietary everything and keeping their hardware locked that there isn't all that much you can tinker with when using a Mac. Aside from the high price of apple products, the customizability of PCs (and the access to games) are what kept me on windows.
  
  What stuff do you think you can’t tinker with on a Mac?

I'm should bring that Ubuntu CD I had shipped to me as a kid to a therapist.
- I had one i lost it. i also had a CD of solaris before oracle bought them out a long time ago.
  
  I still have my SuSE 8.2 9.0 and 9.1 discs, and the official books I bought in a book store to get 9.1. I also have my Solaris discs. They are somehow part of the few things I haven't lost in all of my moving.

So here's a teacher's insight:
Mac:PC:Chromebook Rich---Poor
There is a very strong correlation between the wealth of the kids on my module, and the device they have.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of local files without being shown. PC users, alas, snort too much SharePoint these days to be considered healthy - trying to save a word document locally these days is like climbing a mountain blindfolded. As for the Chromebook kids, they do their best with what they have, and given how little compatibility those devices have with the software I teach, I'm proud of them.
- Most of the time it's realising the difference between local and cloud storage. A lot of students get confused when trying to upload their first coursework - usually it's solved by just showing them the difference between local files (this is stored in a permanent local place) and cloud storage (this is stored permanently somewhere else).
- Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of
  For me, it was trying to explain to a Mac user that she should have a separate profile on her Mac for work vs. personal
  She'd convinced her employer that she could work from home using her own Mac (the office was all Macs except for the video production suite), and he said OK. Didn't ask me, of course. Despite me saying a long time ago when someone else floated the idea, that it was poor practice from a security viewpoint.
  Then three days later the call came - "I can't access work files". So I remote in, she's got links to her personal iCloud Drive directories somehow mixed up with the work Google Drive.
  I started to explain about using a different profile for work and just got a blank stare.
  "You log off your personal profile and log into the work profile"
  "How do I do that?"

I've been a dev for 7 years. I used a PC for the first 6 years and I switched to a mac the last year.
My experience with mac has been terrible. The file explorer is just horrible to navigate. It took me ages to find the way to go anywhere except the "favorite" folders. Compability with the remote linux-servers has been awful with broken keymappings and shortcuts. Using hardware from any other manifacturer is riddled with bugs. The machine is unable to adjust volume if the audio is passed through usb-c. And I routinely encounter bugs where I'm unable to interact with apps until I restart them. Everything which seemed to work by heuristics on a PC requires a lot of attention on my mac. I don't care if I get a floaty animation and bouncy icon if I minimize a window. I just want alt + tab to actually bring back the apps I select.
I am not getting a mac the next time.
- I feel the same way about any machine that isn't a Linux laptop with fully implemented hardware support. I can't stand macos or windows anymore.
  In Apple's defense though, they have better accessibility than anyone else - hands down. That's about all they do right IMO.
- I dunno, I used PCs pretty exclusively until about halfway through college when I switched and every time I try to go back it’s pretty bad. Windows sucks, it just does everything different than *nix systems, and they have like, 5 different ways of doing things? It feels like they’ve had multiple efforts to clean up the tech debt and never completed them.
  And Linux is just lacking for day to day use. I still would love to switch at some point, but it just doesn’t have the right tools and polish. Like, I rely on Karabiner for key remapping and layering and the Linux story is pretty lacking there (though I haven’t looked in a while so could have gotten better). Core stuff for my day to day.
  I think a lot of it is muscle memory. Like yeah, it’s hard to relearn a lot of muscle memory type things. But if you open a terminal, it’s just like any *nix based system, same layout. You can navigate anywhere and open the Finder with open, etc.
  
  I respect that muscle memory is a big thing when iit comes to OS preference. I have spent more than a year now to configure to my preferences and build up muscle memory and understanding of my mac. It's just not happening. Small things which were trivial to me on PC suddenly requires my full attention and I feel like I'm spending a ton of energy doing simple things. And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.
  But my biggest issue is the hardware compability. I like my mechanical logitech keyboard, which features a mac layout (physical stamps on keys). But several buttons are mixed up when connected. And the key mapping seemingly varies depending on whether it's connected through bluetooth or usb. As mentioned audio passed through usb-c is not possible to adjust thourgh the default system. I had to download a third party app to adjust volume - which also stinks because the volume at the lowest setting is a lot higher than I want for some cases. My stream deck seems to work with the mac by a coinflip: half of the times I start the machine, it won't connect.
  But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always "you need to buy apple hardware".
  And that's where I really fall off. I want to use hardware which I find comfortable to me, but it feels like everything about the mac is trying to make me buy more apple stuff.

My first memory with a computer was playing (more like trying to play) Microsoft flight simulator 1.0 on a Macintosh when I was around 8-9. The thing that looks like that:
I only started using Linux when installed dual boot Ubuntu on the family computer around 14-15.
- Those beautiful graphics. That dithering though!
- Wow that is awesome! I have big nostalgia for the early B&W Macs as well, having played on a Mac Classic my uncle had when I was a kid. He actually gave me that computer years ago and it’s still in my basement collecting dust. I powered it up a few years ago and it still worked but then promptly powered it down and put it away. I need to go through it and recap it. Hopefully there aren’t any disastrous leaks.
- My dad had this flight sim on his old PC! That internal speaker and the BW graphics... another one of those games was the keyboard destroyer decathlon.
- My first MS flight simulator was 4, the graphics were similar, but in VGA
  My first game was probably 1944 or moon buggy

Where're all the DOS kids at?! 5 hours and 66 comments, but not a single mention yet.
Never mind solving problems with Windows; shit gets real when the thing boots to aC:\> prompt and you need to know things like the difference between CGA/EGA/VGA/Hercules graphics modes and WTF an IRQ is just to install your games in the first place.
- Kids these days don't know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.
  
  or defragging a disk.
  
  I was talking to a friend just the other day about that. I remember some application we used to reconfigure autoexec.bat to optimize it for one type of memory or the other, but I can't remember the name of the application (I think it came with the OS), and I can't remember what the different memory types were called either.
- Now I'm glad I was at the tail end of DOS. My dad showed me how to interrupt the windows boot to get into DOS for Lemmings and Doom, but for everything else like Anno 1602, Need for Speed 2 and Age of Empires 1, I used Windows 95.
  
  When windows was at version 3, I mostly had the computer booting to command prompt, type win to start windows
  Though at some point I made a boot menu in autoexec.bat to let you choose windows, command prompt, or any of the games installed
- DOS was a step backwards for me from Atari TOS.
  
  What were the Atari terms of service?
  /s
  
  Alright, I'll admit it: my first computer ran Tandy Deskmate, not just plain DOS.
  Still, I did have to exit to a command line to run certain games, I think.
- If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive
  
  Pop quiz: which graphics mode is that screenshot?
- in a care home presumably
  
  Listen here you little shit.
- I absolutely still remember my grandfather having a dual 5.25” IBM and teaching my 6-7 yo self how to use the cli. I still remember that MSDOS 2.0 box he had up on his shelf, and how he taught me to keep a simple text file of the prices of my baseball cards, according to the legendary Beckett price guide.
  I then later vaguely messing around with 3.11 followed by 95+, but the basis of my mediocre understanding of the cli was due to my grandfather teaching me on DOS 2.0.
- DOS5 here, installed from 5.25" floppies on a tiny HDD and looking at one of those awful shades-of-yellow monitors.
  That's if you don't count the computer that didn't have a hard drive and ONLY booted from 3.5" floppy (which was just enough to get a bootable DOS disk and Prince of Persia).
  IRQ's were great for choice. You got to your modem, video card, and soundcard and then picked which two would actually work when they all wanted IRQ5 or 7
  
  I remember when discs got big enough that we could have windows 3.1 installed as well as a current tech game
  I will not miss setting up interrupts for cards, I will not miss setting up extended memory
  Though all that would have been easier were I older. I was in my 20s when Linux became available and the early experience with DOS had me happy to dive right into that
- “What is that high memory area stuff they added in DOS4?”
  gets swallowed by rabbit hole for days
  “Oh, that!”
- Does anyone still know the C> prompt?
- I had 3.1, 95, 98se, XP(teenager).
  I got in at I'd say the best time. XP for the Internet as a teenager was absolutely the best time to be a teenager with computers.
- The only thing I remember from that era is inserting floppy dics to play games

I've learned C++ when I was 10. Should I have myself checked?
- according to the US gov, C and C++ pose a threat to national security because they are a "memory unsafe" language. I hope you can recover from all the pain and memory leaks you had to endure by transitioning to Rust. /s
- No point, c++ already contaminated you. Better than getting java in you early, but both have their own expression of mental illness. I think both are better than C, which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn't exist.
  
  When I was probably like 10 or 11 or something I started learning JavaScript because I thought it was the language Minecraft was written in (It's actually Java)
  
  which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn't exist.
  That's assembley
- Only if you have trouble functioning. The only reason for diagnosis is access to care.
  But, yeah, prior odds are significant ;)
- Nah, you already know the problem, you just need to self medicate.
- it's not going to cause any additional harm:)))
- i only knew HTML and CGI scripts :(

I was brought up on a Commodore 64. I wrote my first program at the age of six using a guide from a computer magazine.
Make of that what you will.
- You're skewing the results
  
  That’s my job.
- Despite growing up in the 90s, a Commodore 128 was the only computer we had until maybe 1998, when we upgraded to some sort of Macintosh. It was just Frogger, Montezuma's Revenge and OutNumbered! for me on computers until we finally got a Dell of some sort running Windows XP in like 2004.
  I got all the pain of different OSes growing up, but now it's just Linux and OpenBSD for me these days.
- having all the time in the world is a perk of being 5-6 that allows you to learn things like that especially when they come in a shiny new game box. I don't think that's necessarily indicative of anything.

"Disclusion" is a dentistry term.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/disclusion
She mean "excluded"
- Literally the first definition says it's an out of use synonym for exclusion
  
  That it is, my bad.
  Thank for noting.
  Although I some how think she wasn't exactly using it in the archaic sense on purpose, but I wouldn't put money on it.

Imagine paying for a blue tick on Xitter.
- could've been before elongated muskrat bought it
  
  It's not unfortunately, there's a date of 09/12/2024 under the original tweet

Children use smartphones way more than "PC" computers today.

As an Old, I started with an Apple ][ and learned BASIC. We did get the classic B&W Macintosh computers when I was 12-13.
- Yep, this study would have to divide things up by age. As a fellow member of the Oregon Trail generation, all my early computers were also Apple ][ and b&w macs. But then eventually by young adulthood it all turned into PCs.
  I enjoyed a stint with Solaris in college (that’s SUN Solaris thankyouverymuch) which I consider my true intro to Linux/posix/whatever-ix.
- I started on a Pr1me 550 type II learning BASIC myself. Apple ][s came out about 4 years later. Then I used them. Windows SA now.
- My youth was at least partly misspent hacking z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC664. Not as many regrets as one might assume. I miss when (8-bit) assembler was simple enough to hand-code without playing "surf the reference manual".
- I learned basic on an old trash 80 from radio shack in the late 70's. I really miss mucking around with it.
  Edit: Now I use Linux.

This schism exists in my household. Mrs. Warp Core had access to a Mac and went on to do non-computer things. I had a PC and went full-ASD/ADHD HAM on (what feels like) every iteration of commercial computer tech ever since.

Hey when I was 12 I- hold on a second!
- You're not onto anything so there's no need to "hold on". Several people did the same thing without some stupid disorder being The Reason Why.
  I pirated applications and games at 9 because remotely breathing in my family's presence was the equivalent of screaming fire in a crowded theater. Why would I ask them anything when I can ask Google? Google won't hit me, tie me to a chair, lock me in a basement, scream at me, spit on me, or take all my possessions indefinitely. Google also won't tell professional child abusers what I searched so that can be used to emotionally abuse me more.
  Why would I ask people who would scream at me for asking for a 64¢ candy bar, about a $200 application? Why would I tell them about something illegal? That's just asking for drama. But sure, some stupid ass puzzle piece Made Me So Smart and that's why I pirated gamemaker and fl studio. The same puzzle piece that made me so (r word) and unfit for society that I needed to be locked away in an institution that dumbed me down into a dead weight.
  Also using a computer is as easy as playing a video game. The directions and definitions are straightforward. Some stupid puzzle piece didn't made a kid know how to do something, the kid taught themselves by reading. Which the people pointing to some stupid puzzle piece can do as well, instead of reducing a human being to some stupid ass puzzle piece. Literally dehumanizing but I'm ready to be the problem, as a human asking to be treated as a human. Downvotes mean nothing.

I don't even know which way the split would go. Many people i know studying computer science first year have a macbook, in what seems disproportionate. Maybe just general university student bias? also apple walled garden* lol *on the iPhone
- They told us we should have a linux or a mac in first year comp sci and if we didn't we should use the lab machines. Probably because they are both unix like operating systems.
  
  Couldn't just ssh in to the school machines when you weren't in the lab?
- I heard gen z mostly has iphone

My elementary school had those chunky, colorful iMac G3s that I played hella coolmathgames on. At home we had an old Compaq desktop with Windows 2000 (later XP).
I never learned anything useful except general computer literacy but I sure do miss those days.

I started with System 7 on the Mac and because of that I had to quickly learn ResEdit and hex editing. Ironically this made me better later in life with windows and Linux, that shit is a breeze in comparison.
Also HyperCard fucking slapped
- I used ResEdit to fix an issue with my school's email system.
  Someone used a Hypercard stack I made to "break" a computer, It got me banned from the school computers. Same school even.
- Oh my god I forgot about hypercard...wowww. Memories.
  
  The AOL amateur HyperCard game scene was like Newgrounds before flash. I wish the world was still that simple sometimes. Or, at least, that fun.

I am probably the only person ever to grow up with a UNIX terminal server as my home computer. any crazy IT thing i do now pales in comparison to my dad, running ethernet cables through our heating ducts in a probable building code violation
- **As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands... I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It's fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered "needed.". Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and "evacuate" only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months.... But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)
  Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018
- ...you dad did very well; give him a hug this december...

Wait, if "Linux"=autistic, what does that make us GNU/Linux users?
- Keep in mind that autism is a spectrum
  
  Linux -> GNU/Linux -> GNU/Hurd?

First home family computer was a Packard Bell, windows 3.1...was forbidden from taking it apart or messing with the settings.
First computer that I was allowed to mess with was a thrift store Commodor 64...
- That damn "warranty void if removed" sticker. I wasn't allowed to tinker with the old family Win3.1 PC until 1999 because of that damn sticker, and only because we finally replaced the old dinosaur with a shiny new Windows 98 SE laptop.
  The irony is that I regret my decision. 11-year-old me thought it would be a good idea to take the entire thing apart without knowing how to put it back together, so I never did. It would have been nice to still have it around to relive childhood memories...
  On the bright side, it sparked my interest in building my own PCs, which I was finally able to do in 2008 after saving up my money. Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB of DDR2 800, and a Radeon HD 4850. Built it powerful enough to run Crysis. It couldn't run most games beyond 45 FPS, but back then that was good enough for me. These days even 120Hz no longer looks as smooth as it used to. Can't wait for the day when we finally get blur-free 1000Hz OLEDs

My commodore 64 laughs at the false dichotomy.
- Yes, where we were READY to solve problems like "is that game ported to my system" and "is it any good?"
  FWIW, we were also dropped immediately into a BASIC interpreter, day one. PC's may have been priming IT professionals, but were C64 users primed to be programmers?

careful, you mentioned linux on 196, that's a hangin' offense
- Your comment doesn't make sense, unless it's just some really dry ironic humour

I wish Linux existed when I was twelve.
- It did when I was, and it was a nightmare even though I was very tech savvy
  It’s so much better now

"Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results"
"Autism involves a significant deviation from expected behaviour"
They have played us for absolute fools.
(I know autism describes a real cluster of traits, but it is only socially constructed norms that define those traits as aberrant, I am not saying it isn't real)
- Yeah, we create the rules that decide whether or not someone is autistic, and we decide what is viewed as "weird" (honestly, everyone is weird, if you were perfectly average in every way, you would actually, in a way, be weird)

Correlation does not imply causation though...
- Indeed. It can hint towards more required research.
- It does imply casualson though

Where does TRS-80 fit into this study?

I used an Apple IIe in 1st grade. With the big 5.25in floppys. Learned logo and figured out how to make spirograms using recursive patterns.
Much later we got a Dell P90 and win 95 before going through the rest of windows releases up through win 7. I figured out Linux in high school at some point, but that’s more of a hobby from time to time.
But also used os/7/8/9 at school and later switched to Mac in general.

I bought Red Hat Linux in a store from my allowance when I was 11 or 12. We had no internet at home back then.
- Same, though I think I also picked up SUSE and slackware around the same time

When I was 13 I installed Linux in Virtualbox on a Mac because for some reason thought dual booting would be harder, we did not have any non-apple devices in the house, I do not recommend, the performance was terrible (I probably had something set up wrong because it was really way worse than you would expect)
I have ended up on Windows with a Linux laptop for traveling, but will probably switch to Linux as soon as either:
I get a new VR headset
Monado gets decent controller tracking support
It's 2026 and Windows with WMR support has stopped getting security updates
Then I will have crossed the whole mac->windows->linux pipeline.

I feel attacked !
Or seen. same difference.

Ah crud, I installed Linux on my computer when I was 12 (replacing MacOS, no less).

I dunno, maybe it depends on the age. I grew up with a G3 PowerPC and system 9, and I did spend a little time with early OSX (panther). My schools had these terrible Athlon boxes that could barely run XP without blowing up, and as I was leaving high school they were trying to get them to run Vista. That gave me the early impression that Macs were just better, until I went to a vocational school with Ivy Bridge Dell laptops running Windows 7. A friend of mine convinced me to try Linux, and I was impressed with how much easier it was to set up for development, but I ultimately stuck with Windows hosts for gaming, and Linux VMs, then Docker, then WSL for development. I'm still trying to put in the work now for moving away from Windows entirely now that AI is here and gaming on Linux is better. I think maybe it might just come down to having the resources, because if I got to try all three with at least decent hardware, I would have made that journey a lot faster.

Well the economy is what rips you off to make companies money, so its actually one of the more honest usages I've seen

Um. VAX cluster?

Linux users should be included. After all they switched OS being they couldn't understand how image formatting works.

Too bad correlation does not imply causation.

I started with a iMac (MacOS X) before moving on to Windows (10) and then Linux at roughly 14
- I too started with Linux at 14. I just got my first computer, an old laptop with Windows. It was too slow and I couldn't even figure out anything in settings. (Windows 10 and its Settings + reduced Control Panel).
  I at first tried to find "Linux". I had little idea about it, but I thought Linux must be it, and these others were just modifications, so I kept trying to find "pure Linux". Eventually figured out the distributions thing and decided on Mint (MATE).
  I dug through all old movies just to find a rarity. One single movie burned to DVD-RW, perfect! (First computer, why would I have a USB drive?)
  In the end I was using Windows for whopping 2 days.
  And since I finally had a proper computer, it only took a few months and my phone was running a custom ROM (PixelExperience).
  
  I was just watching a someordinarygamers video when I decided to try Ubuntu in a VM, it was laggy but I loved it. I tried it on a live USB and it was smooth so I installed it.

Grew up on Mac (Chuck Yeager game anyone?).
DOS & Win3.1 later. QBasic for first language. Later VB, ew.
Linux sporadically throughout.
Use Linux largely for side projects but unfortunately all my jobs have me stuck on Windows during the day.
- Chuck Yeager's air combat? I played that on PC

I installed my first Linux distro in my country's equivalent of high school, probably 17 years old or so. It was just Ubuntu. 🤷‍♂️ Not very difficult. Just pop in the CD/USB and follow the installation wizard.

When I was 12 my dad gave me two defect PCs and says: find out how to compare the working parts and you can have this one for you. Also a copy of win95.
If I look back this was enough to learn about every hard- and software related issue ever. Hell, even the mainboards back then doesn't have any documentations about jumpers etc.
And win95 need a regularly reinstall. If I compare how many reinstalls I needed between win and Linux, windows wins.

Maybe I am autistic after all.

Seems like one of those bell curve memes with macOS on the left and right and windows in the center
- Clowns to the left of me
  Jokers to the right
  Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

No, include autistic kids. Exclude unwanted kids regardless of anything, they'll skew the results. The unwanted neglected kids growing up with poppy playtime and skibidi toilet are going to program games for a job after being told to go away by their entire family. Everyone else wouldn't have used computers as often because they were spending time with friends and family.
Where there's smoke, they pinch back.
- My parents loved and cherished me growing up, and still do, which is part of why I was the only kid in sixth grade with a laptop (the other part was I had a disability accommodation with the school that allowed me to type my assignments rather than write them by hand). The fact that they encouraged my programming talent at that age, didn't get mad when I installed a Fedora dual-boot on that laptop, and bought me the book Python for Kids for my 12th birthday, is why I'm a programmer now.
  I'm sorry your parents didn't show you the love and support you deserved, but that's not the criterion we should be looking for.
  
  Actually that's also an interesting statistic to cover. What's the proportion of programmers who learnt because they were supported vs unsupported (and while we're at it do code quality analysis just to see)