#I could torrent shit and figure out how to get new codecs so I could watch stuff

[nootybloops]

Literal computer programmer here.

Primary school, mac at school, windows at home (once we got a computer). High school, windows at school, mac at home. First two laptops were macs (one still runs my music!).

I didn't even learn how to start programming anything other than very basic webdev stuff until this point! I was in my late 20s!

Desktop is windows purely because so many games still require it, extremely shitty third laptop is linux because I was only using it for uni programming work anyway so why even bother paying for a windows license when you're going to have to fake linux half the time to compile stuff anyway.

All of which to say: I've got Some Experience in this shit, and I'mma tell you your computer literacy has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with a combination of how interested you are, and the quality of the teaching you receive.

Forever grateful to my PS Computer Teacher, who who taught all the kids at my school how to use The Computers! IIRC the first computers we ever got a go at didn't even have mice, they just had keyboards! And she taught us about whatever the mac equivalent of ms paint was by drawing the GUI on a whiteboard, and explaining the icons!

(This is actually an extremely effective method, by the way. No matter what anyone tells you, understanding icons is not intuitive, and an explanation beforehand stops you freaking out because So! Many! Thing!!! I remember we were all particularly confused by the eraser tool.)

As it happens, she was also the librarian. And when we were a bit older and the school actually had an internet connection (it was the 90s, okay), she taught us about how to find stuff out online, and how to tell if it was reputable or not. Extremely good teacher, and excellent at guessing what would actually be useful for us to know in the future.

Anyway these days, where phones do so much shit By Magic*, and both mac and windows upper management seem to want pcs to follow them (see: app stores), it's no surprise that kids don't know how things work. How could they? The level of technical skills they need to make things work is tiny, and from what I hear they don't get helpful computer lessons any more! It's like expecting a regular train commuter to know how the signaling works. Just. What??

* ie, in the background where you can't see anything at all, even if you want to.

Also to underline Feather's point above, we had a semester's worth of typing lessons in high school. I was the only one in the class who knew how to touch type at the start of it, and I'm pretty damn sure I was the only one who knew how to touch type at the end of it, because no one cared. The teaching in that class was uh... nonexistent, I don't remember a single lesson. IIRC there was some kind of typing tutor program we were supposed to use, but we were pretty much just left to do whatever on the computers (as long as it was text-based. There was a LOT of people turning the font size in word way up and writing swears at people across the room).

If I hadn't already known I probably would've used the time to learn, because even back then it was extremely obvious that it was going to be An Extremely Helpful Life Skill, but clearly none of my classmates agreed with that. :/