I'm curious what her hypothesis is, I don't think there is a correlation at all personally, seen a ton of people who know nothing about their computers regardless of Mac/Windows as their primary os.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Should've written "Mac PCs" just to mess with people.
When Apple moved to Intel CPU’s there was the creation of the Hackintosh. Which was running apple’s OS on any PC hardware you had around that happened to be compatible. If you thought finding Linux compatible hardware was rough…that was worse.
I'm aware, yes, and that's what I was referring to. By that time it was basically the same hardware as any other computer, but with slightly different motherboards and with special proprietary firmware.
There's also some irony in the fact that "PC" was once a trademark that became generic. Someone should do the "Is this xerox a Canon?" joke, but with computers.
If you've had to mess around with EMM386 and HIMEM settings to play Wing Commander 2, you win.
Autoexec.bat's and boot disks for everything ftw.
People are probably running FreeDOS nowadays though which uses a different syntax.
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Does messing around to play Red Alert at 640 x 480 (instead of the default 320 x 240) qualify? I emphasize that I modded the thing to have ICBM carrying submarines for more realism, and played global thermonuclear war with my university course mate over an RS-232 cable. :P
(We could not afford Ethernet, or maybe couldn't understand it, since it was such a new thing. I recall seeing shiny Ethernet cards from 3COM with some envy.)
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The thing with Macs is you don't have to spend 80% of your time troubleshooting them. I love my Mac and OS X. I boot it up, log in, and don't have to think about it. The UI is very intuitive and easy to use as well.
Intuitive for very basic things, but if you want to do anything outside the norm or some ease of use things from other desktops, goodluck.
The first mainframe account I ever had was an nCube2 supercomputer. No timesharing or anything, the full power of a Unix system just waiting under your terminal session. Today I have the same CLI under the hood of my MBP because it runs on a Unix kernel. In terms of power tho, this laptop makes the supercomputer look like a toy. I wouldn't call either one's use case "very basic things."
Every year I believe this more and more. I've always been lumped in with the tech crowd by anyone not tech-savvy, but in reality all my knowledge is from personal troubleshooting and very limited (I'm thinking of trying Linux and that's gonna be like a whole ass event for me). I used to think that was dumb, but then I started working with more Gen Z...
They have zero idea how to troubleshoot anything. If the computer doesn't do what they expect, it's a full stop for some of them. I have "solved" so many IT problems by replugging a cable or just knowing the settings option exists. These aren't stupid kids either, they're in a tough industry and very capable otherwise. I think my generation was right place, right time to learn this stuff organically because shit just never worked quite right -- apple was largely the outlier back then.
If you even know what an OS is you're ahead of 70% of the population. Probably more.
I have an external Samsung SSD that my mac mini just refuses to keep indexed.
The solution to this is when I log in every day I have to go into the Mac system settings and tell finder to ignore my external drive, close system setting, then reopen systen setting and tell finder to no longer ignore the external drive. This is the only way to get it to reindex everything.
I need to do this everytime the mac mini wakes from sleep.
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Them's fightin' words 'round these parts, buster.
(... i agree)
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Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I mean, I managed to fuck up my Windows 95 just by installing a couple of games. God knows how that happened.
I remember!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can't remember what game it was, but I couldn't get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers....
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it...basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
Same, but I did not mess with the drivers. Learnt quickly how to format and reinstall after the first visit from the "computer guy".
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I grew up on Mac and only switched to Windows when I was 30. lol
I still wonder what Linux is like… It’s probably cool.
Depending on when and how deep your Mac experience was, it might be an easy switch. Despite its numerous failings MacOS, from OSX onwards, is a Unix. In particular a BSD, via NeXTSTEP.
Well, the time to find out is now :)
I would love to try it out, but if there is one thing that will make me want to set the world on fire: it’s tech issues lmfao Not saying that’s what the experience is like, I just kinda get that impression from memes and shit
The setup does not seem undaunting lmao
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Looking at the comments, it occurs to me that we're not a representative section of the online community.
Were literally people who went out of their way to not use a conventional/commercial tech product.
I wonder what the % of people on here is who have built a pc, used a raspberry pi or installed Linux compared to the outside world.
it occurs to me that we're not a representative section of the online community
This! I have been preaching this for years, both online and IRL with the IT techs I manage. Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
The vast majority of people just want to buy a computer in a box, and have it work mostly perfectly. Which windows and Mac's do really really well. And yes, windows isnt perfect but neither is Linux. And for 95% of people the most demanding and complicated thing they'll do is web browsing, and power users might do something wild like play games through steam or install an alternate browser.
And we havent even touched work computers yet, which is a whole other level of "I don't care at all" from end users.
Remember people "Linux is amazing!" is meaningless to people who have never heard the acronym SSD let alone what it is or why it's better than a HDD.
I like to compare it to sewing because I genuinely don't care at all about it. But I hear people say "just thrift clothes and tailor them to you!" But that ignores two things.
- I genuinely can't think of a whole lot of other leisure activities I'd want to do less than sewing and tailoring.
- I barely know how to sew a button or mend a rip. Do you think I know how to actually tailor something? Or what types of tools I need? Or how to use them?
Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
God I love this comic. I've used it hundreds of times since he's posted it.
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I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
I just want to point out that I was somewhat tech literate in the 2000s. and The Mac OS still scared me.
My first experience with Linux was at 10 years old or so. I had a netbook that I'd installed Ubuntu on.
Flash forward nearly 14 years and I use Arch as pretty much a daily driver these days.
I feel old. Linux didn't exist when I was 10 years old, Linus was still in high school at that point. My home computer was a TRS-80 CoCo 2.
I feel medium aged. Netbooks didn't exist when I was 10 years old. My home computer was a 386 with Win3.11 that was very dated at the time.
TRS!
Yeah, I'm only turning 24 this October, so that's much before my time. I've always found something charming about machines from that era. My grandfather has an Amiga 500 that he got back in the day that still works. Sometimes him and I play around on it just for fun.
I got an Amiga 500 when I was 7.....some years ago now.
I miss my Amiga 500 Plus dearly... If only I understood English better at the time, and had someone teach me the basics of computing, instead of just learning to play games...
From my understanding the machine was huge in Europe in its day.
I'm American myself, but my grandfather is from Sweden originally. That's where he got it back in the 80s
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I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker.....I don't know crap about any of that. I've simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I've had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I'm guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.
I think my kids may benefit, as my wife only uses Mac, I have 2 Ubuntus and a Mint, and the kids use Chromebooks at school. We have 2 iPad and a Galaxy tab in the house. 1 kid has an Android phone and the other an iPhone. My wife and I both have flagship Android phones.
Sometimes it's fun to watch them debate over which systems they prefer, depending on the school projects they work on.
Mixed messages here: "I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble." Fellow human, those are the actions of a programming genius and hacker. The bar is remarkably low. A lot of people can't even read what it says on the screen.
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It was VIsta for me!
Omg, this is the best early-morning laugh that I've had in a long time. Mac-nerd, here. From childhood. Also a Linux nerd for servers. This is so great that I immediately sent it to friends in tech. I'm still laughing like a nut.