Seeing kids nowadays fail at basic computer stuff is so disheartening.

google practically kinda gave up on improving thier pixel, its just a over-glorified AI phone, which they are obsessed, they dont even compete with the other flagship phones anymore. now alot of tech companies are moving towards Datamining/AI instead of developing.

Now do cars.

walled gardens... so... just like Apple did, decades earlier?

Eh, I don't really agree.

To want to learn something starts with curiosity and the willingness to learn. I was always trying to fuck around with games and programs before I knew that modding was even a thing. When I was met with restrictions I always tried breaking them. I got around admin protection on school computers that literally only had access to the desktop.

My youngest brother on my dad's side (my family is complicated) is a shut-in who barely acts like the adult he's supposed to be, never owned a chromebook, and sits in front of the computer more than I even do. He is incredibly tech illiterate.

Ah yes, a vast increase in the accessibility of computers actually made people less tech literate. This whole "gen-z can't computer like me" crap is just millennials entering into their juvenoia phase. I guess we're all just damned to become boomers, old and scared.

I'll come off it. I know plenty of 30 and 40-year-olds who are utterly incapable of performing the most basic of tasks on a computer. By your logic they should not have an issue since they grew up with Windows.

Some people are just really stupid and have zero interest in educating themselves.

They're all to blame

Most people suck with computers, no matter their age. There may or may not have been a time frame which resulted in a higher percentage of people knowing more basic computer stuff. Kids on computers tended to pick up more basic computer knowledge than kids only interacting with gaming consoles for the past 40 years. If you want to blame one thing for decreasing basic computer knowledge, kids being glued to their smartphones and not touching computers (laptops/towers) at all is the much more obvious candidate. Like kids playing on their N64 (insert arbitrary gaming console here) and not touching computers before. I think, OP, you're falling into a trap of over-projection, where you project yourself and your peers as a standard onto a generation/age-group, when most of us here on lemmy have always been the outliers. People are not "tech savvy"; never have been. Trying to put the blame on one company and product (no matter how evil and bad both are) for select age groups is ridiculous.

I think my kids are more accepting of Linux on the family PC because of their school chrome books. We'll see how it plays out when they start purchasing their own devices though.

Man I really need to get the desk for my kid’s PC set up. The machine is already there and got switched to Linux back during the winter.

He will have long creative hyper-focused minecraft build sessions on console, so I bet he’d be pumped to find out he could use the CLI with a keyboard. Or as he calls it, “the commands.”

I just bought one of these for $35 dollars and put Linux mint on it