I think this has less to do with Microsoft and more to do with the average human has no interest in learning something that only passively helps them.
I only know a handful of things about working on an automobile, while my father could practically take one apart and put it back together wholesale.
I can take apart a computer and put it back together wholesale, but I'm lost on an internal combustion engine.
I pay someone with expertise to handle the engine, because I've spent my time learning other things.
Look, unless the people you're talking about are doing tech jobs, there isn't a reason for them to learn the depths of it, just like there isn't a reason for them to learn the depths of how their car works. Both a car and a computer are tools, and those tools are made to be used by people who may not know the depths of the internal workings of either.
This post feels like elitism and gatekeeping to me, as someone who thinks Windows sucks and prefers Linux. The idea that it's the OS that is "holding people back" and not that those people might have more important things to do with their time than dedicate half their life to an operating system is absurd. If someone spends 20 years becoming a doctor, I'm not going to act like they're a dumbass because they don't know everything about fucking computers.
People don't want to learn more because for most people not knowing more doesn't impact their fucking life. Just like me not knowing more about my car doesn't generally impact my fucking life. Because I've never had trouble finding someone to pay to fix it for me.
Surprise, we're the people who are paid to fix computers for the people who are just using them as simple tools. Maybe we shouldn't be so upset about that.
Also, last but not least, Android is a strain of Linux and it suffers from all the same issues listed above as Windows. Acting like you couldn't pull the same bullshit in Linux if you wanted to is kind of a joke, because it's already been done with Android.
All the ad infested bullshit we all hate about Windows 10 and 11? Blame Linux-based Android.
EDIT: Also, personal opinion, if we're talking about which CLI is easier to learn and use. Microsoft has made great strides with Powershell being easy and accessible to people who haven't faced a command line environment before. The things that make its command line better than Linux's are two things, and only two things. (I hate that it's object oriented instead of text oriented, Powershell has a lot of bad things, too)
First, human-readable commands whose names describe what the command does in a verb-noun format. This means instead of Linux with some very, very obscurely named commands that are not descriptive and you just have to sort of memorize, you can just sort of remember because the name is human readable.
Secondly, the get-command command is huge because it allows me to search these verb-noun names for the command I'm looking for. On Linux, if I don't know the specific command, I have to search the internet, because there isn't a built-in tool that will give me an idea of what each command does and allows me to search for them through a filter. Once you find a command you think might work, it has the get-help command which produces something similar to a Man page.
Linux has Man pages, but because there is no rhyme or reason to how any commands are named, it's not very easy to find the command you're looking for if you don't already know the command. On Windows, if I know what the command does I may already have enough information to find the command using get-command instead of having to turn to Google and be like "what command do I use if I am trying to do X?"
So if we're talking about the superiorly designed command line that's easier for first time users. Powershell is where it's at. Because Linux is a confusing fucking mess of 30 years of random decisions by lone programmers. Literally the only reason I know commands in Linux CLI is because I had to memorize them. I don't do so much memorizing Powershell commands. If Linux was being built from scratch today, I'd practically demand a similar naming convention system to make it easier to understand what the fuck commands do.
This feels like a bit of a sideways take. I'll preface this with that I love Linux, and its been my preferred operating system for years.
That being said, "helplessness" isn't Microsoft's fault. Most people do not want to know the ins-and-outs of how something works, and that's perfectly okay. I am a software developer, but despite the fact that I have an Android (Pixel) phone I generally do not care to root my phone, flash alternative ROMs, etc anymore. I use Linux on my PC, but I do not want to spend hours tinkering with my phone, only for it to most likely end up in a state that is less-than-par than what it came with. I am glad that Android is open enough (well, its not as cut-and-dry as that but its more open than iOS) for the people who do want to tinker around with it to be able to do so, but its not for me. If I'm out and trying to request an Uber, I don't want my phone to crash every time I open the app just because the ROM I'm using has a bug.
By the same token, there are times where I don't really want to mess around with going through a million settings on my PC when I just need it to allow me to do some work. That is a trade-off that you tend to make with Linux (though its certainly gotten a lot better over the years), and I can't fault people for not wanting to go through that. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't made that trade-off and had just stayed blind to the love/hate relationship I've come to form around Linux.
I do not want to tinker around with my keyboard, I just want it to allow me to type. I don't want to tinker around with my headphones, I just want to listen to music. I use my refrigerator every day, and while I have some rudimentary understanding of how it works, I really rather not tinker around with it - and if it stops working, you're not likely to find me trying to fix it myself (short of say, the light bulb going out).
A coworker of mine convinced another coworker to wipe their system and install Fedora, and use the Looking Glass + VFIO passthrough trick to have a Windows VM within Linux like he does. He spent both of his days off trying to get it to work (and facing weird issues that even I couldn't explain and find a solution for), and at the end of today he decided to reinstall Windows so that tomorrow he can have something reliable to use for work. This is exactly why I usually don't push people to use Linux. If they want to know more about it, sure I'm happy to show them the ropes - but selling it as a perfect solution is a bad idea and only makes Linux look bad.
If Microsoft didn't make an operating system that was simple enough for users who just want things to work, yet powerful enough for those who want to do more with it (such as making games, or using CAD software for engineering) then someone else would. I definitely get frustrated with Windows, but at the end of the day, it is what most of the world uses for a reason (just like Linux is used for most web servers around the world for a reason) - its the right tool for their job, whatever that job might be. Sure, the vague error codes that you get from Windows is frustrating at times, but Windows isn't open source and that is not likely to change. How is the old XP error code format of
STOP CODE 0X003ABF VIOLATION OCCURRED AT KERNEL.DLL(along with the rest of the useless stack trace) going to help you anymore than the shorter ones that are generally found on Windows nowadays? You can't exactly go submit a pull request to fix the issue. In terms of the ability to search for the error, I've very rarely ever seen a Windows error code that didn't have a million and one causes (and^2the amount of potential "solutions" for the supposed cause). It's certainly not going someone whose just trying to do their homework for school, or edit their resume for job applications.The same thing applies to the whole iOS vs Android debate. The same coworker who sold Linux to my other coworker uses an iPhone (actually, they both do as far as I'm aware), because its been reliable for him. He doesn't need to have the source code to iOS in order for it to do what he needs it to do. Quite frankly, the whole "sheeple" thing that you tend to hear people say, and this "Windows users are zombies" take being portrayed in this comment is incredibly childish. If you're not sharing the computer, the phone, etc and someone else owns it - why does it matter what they use?
I suppose you could argue that the majority of people these days don't want to troubleshoot anything, but can you really blame them? Imagine yourself before anything that you learnt about Linux, Windows, and computers in general - with the way things are built (think laptops and phones, with how their components tend to be soldered in) doing anything yourself to repair stuff is very difficult, and has a high chance of leaving you with a brick (which isn't a Microsoft invention). How many people have you seen try to fix a software related issue on their PC or phone, and ended up making the issue worse (which can be done just as easily, if not easier, on Linux)? Those stories are why a lot of people do not want to try to fix something and reach out to support, take it in for repair, replace it, etc.
Most people who drive cars are not mechanics. Most computer users are not also computer engineers; they don't want to be and shouldn't have to be.
If you want to drive your car with spare parts and tools in the back, outfitted with gloves, goggles, a scarf, and an oilcoat; you can do that. That doesn't mean that everyone else should do that. It's not 1992 anymore.
Nice, I made a wokrshop about that earlier this year for RightsCon :
"Can you host the metaverse? How learned helplessness from Big Tech made you believe you can't
BigTech seems expensive, complex, secure, new and basically the only way to use any modern tool. This is a blatant lie, repeated daily and orchestrated to limit emerging technology to very few for-profit corporations. Being a repeated lie is a problem because instead of at least trying to challenge the status quo we, all of us, can assume it is true and give up on trying, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Before digging into the technical aspects it is important to first prove it by running a short experiment then, only after, question how lie made us collectively and individually impotent. Learned helplessness itself will be used to identify extremely difficult situations most of us did encounter and might still encounter in the present.
This session will invite participants to simply try what is the state of the art of BigTech marketing at the moment, namely "the metaverse", and show that behind the abstract concept there is a technical reality that is not that complex and definitely not unachievable, even for a independent person with a very limited budget.
The workshop itself will rely on self-hosted open-source tools in order to both communicate and capture lessons learned, demonstrating by its own execution that synchronization and exploration of such a topic is possible today. "
If people here are interested I can record it again in a presentation format.
Good argument. I definitely read that.👍
- Giving effective error codes is the opposite of unhelpful
- Users who can't figure out the underlying logic behind a GUI aren't exactly going to thrive in a CLI environment
- The dominance of Office is because it's better than its competitors, and because getting businesses to change literally anything they do is near impossible. SPSS isn't even a Microsoft product.
- Troubleshooting on Linux certainly never involves "edit this root-owned file buried 6 layers deep in a cubby hole you never knew existed", and it never involves "run this .sh script lol".
This is an absolutely insane take
Why have we posted a massive wall of text as a picture?
I haven't read all the comments yet so forgive me if I'm repeating this.
This is not specific to Windows or Microsoft. There's been a general dumbing down and more hand holding going on for decades now.
People don't need to think for themselves more and more. A huge amount of technology and information dessert is allowing people to become increasingly stupid.
Driving for example, many would assume that technology like lane assist is there to keep people safe from mistakes. Which it is, certainly. But only because people are becoming lazier drivers.
It's not so much a chicken or egg issue as a horrible feedback loop of stupidity or downward spiral into dumbness.
I honestly worry for the human race with how increasingly lazy and idiotic we are collectively becoming.
At this rate, we don't have to worry about robots, aliens or AI obliterating us, we'll be too dense to recognise it and welcome our extinction with open arms and apathy.
I feel like a lot of this is also the case with Apple's ecosystem. People get used to having specific apps and get complacent. In that case though I feel like another driving factor is the financial investment when you have iOS and MacOS apps, an iPhone, an iPad, and so on that all mesh with each other.
I work with a lot of Windows admins who have to move over to Linux, and this post is extremely accurate. One additional thing I've noticed is that because Windows error messages are terrible the users have learned to simply ignore them as there's no useful information. Getting them to stop and read what's in front of them is one of the hardest things to do.
The core problem is education and bad UX. People are taught how to do specific things (click here, type this word, press this button) without ever being told why. And the bad UX discourages exploration of different ways of doing things. So it never occurs to them that there might be a better way.
Personally, I think it's ok for people to not have a deep understanding of their computer, but if you use one for hours every day, it makes sense that you know how to use it. Just like I don't expect a driver to know how to take apart an engine but they should know how to change a flat or put in coolant.
What does this have to do with Linux?
Tldr: something something Microsoft bad
"If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you'll end up with a more complex system" - Aaron Griffin
Great post, but I’d argue that the existence of a GUI can help in learning how the system works as long as it’s well designed, mostly because it allows a user to wonder around and turn knobs. That’s why I kinda like OpenSuse and yast and woukd like to see more programs like it spring up elsewhere in other distros
It pains me to have people complain about some large company who broke there workflow.
While that may be true, I've found Microsoft's Troubleshooter almost seem like magic in finding and fixing some issues, where as with arch (or any other distro) I would have to hunt everywhere to fix some issue that happened randomly or because some dependency of some dependency of some new package I installed broke something.
SAP does this too.
It's definitely not human nature and is, instead, an improbably well coordinated conspiracy by a gigantic corporation known for being full of internal conflict over a span of decades to engineer helplessness in users. Whereas we all know that users are normally such resilient, inquisitive souls, more than willing to engage with a piece of technology in order to understand it. Or they were, until Microsoft attacked. Alas, if only it were not for the great evil empire, all would be well. At least this very real conspiracy serves the additional purpose of flattering the community's vanities and affirming its values as both morally correct and intellectually superior. So we got that going for us, which is nice.
I object to the author of this laying all of the blame on MS. Apple software design is the worst offender when it comes to coddling users into a state of being unable to troubleshoot issues themselves, IMO. Want to discover anything more than the extremely limited options available in the GUI? Well too bad, you don't know the secret keystroke. What's that, there's literally no documentation for this CLI utility? An error occurred! Here's an incomprehensible report that looks like a dog's breakfast, good luck. Despite its BSD roots, MacOS is heinously bad in terms of user education, and it is seen as the "easiest OS to use".
Just another American grift
A lot of people have already made good comments / replies on this post, but let me argue against the third point ("MS discouragestrying out something new"). This must have been made by someone not even working in a MS ecosystem, because there's a shitton of doing the same thing with a lot of different tools. Or GUIs.
Want to take notes in MS365 echosystem? You have word, Onenote, MS-Teams wiki (that is being deprecated, thank god), Loop components.
Want to save/share a file? You got Onedrive, SharePoint document libraries or MS-Teams (fun fact: they're all using SharePoint as the underlying technology, but depending on the GUI you choose, you get diffrent representation of the underlying files).
Want to manage your tasks? You got To-do, Planner, Flags in Outlook, Tasks in Teams and, drum-roll, MS loop (again!). Thankfully, they all "talk" to eachother so you can at least see all tasks assigned to you when you open your To-do app.
So no, MS does present a lot of different ways to accomplish someting (almost too many...). Whether that is good or bad, I leave it up to the reader, but the new Microsoft certainly is more daring in trying out new things.
If you don't want to read through all of this, here is a shortened version by chatgpt :
The author presents a thought-provoking perspective on the impact of Microsoft's approach to computing. They suggest that Microsoft's products tend to obscure the inner workings of computers, contributing to a sense of mystification among users. Error messages that lack meaningful explanations and a heavy reliance on graphical user interfaces are highlighted as factors that deter users from understanding the technology they use.
Moreover, the author argues that the Microsoft ecosystem discourages users from exploring alternatives and gaining a deeper understanding of computer systems. Vendor lock-in and a reluctance to delve into the underlying principles of software and technology are seen as barriers to users becoming more versatile and informed computer users.
In essence, the author contends that Microsoft's ecosystem fosters a perception of computer use as something magical and impenetrable, making it difficult to retrain users once they have adopted this mindset. They suggest that an alternative approach, emphasizing text-based communication with computers and exposing users to different options, could lead to a more informed and adaptable user base.
This viewpoint encourages us to consider the impact of user interfaces and software ecosystems on users' perceptions and abilities when it comes to technology. It underscores the importance of promoting digital literacy and encouraging users to explore and understand the technology they rely on.
The spirit of hacking has to be revived. Not just for software but also computer hardware and hardware in general. It is just a dream, but curiosity about how things work would make people long for free software and the right to repair. So that is why hacking is discouraged by big profiteering corporations, I guess 🤔
hahahah "ERROR 234067832458762786 IN MODULE aksldfjalksdjfssd, SHOOT YOURSELF AND REPORT TO THE AUTHORITIES"
Very good post. Very true post.
Brainless take. Yeah they mystified it. Or Computers are pretty magical, and it was fucking hard to do shit on them in the beginning. . and it's delusional to think that a text console makes it easier to work with, that it's somehow not capitalism's but no that someone makes a gui and formats that's just the fucking illuminati brotherhood and not someone trying to make computers usable
This is very believable, almost to a point when I would love to read something more than a meme
I agree with 100% of this and can confirm with my experience in working with user support.
With RedHat it seemed the complexity was intended to drive training courses. Microsoft never made similar courses available to the average person. (Maybe an artifact of the times and is held back by various B2B exclusivity contracts?)
