What are some things you think tech people presume others know, and know how to do?
It's helpful to take a few steps back from time to time to reassess where we're each coming from on our knowledge of tech (or anything) to better communicate.
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Everything.
From the difference between WiFi, cellular data, and wired Ethernet to the ports on a computer.
People don’t know shit, and it’s getting worse thanks to the abundance of things like tablets and phones. Nobody knows anything about operating systems, file system structure or types, or even how to turn Bluetooth on.
And I am not what I consider highly tech literate. Plenty of stuff stumps me or I simply don’t know how to do. Yet I’m the family “IT guy” that has to troubleshoot and fix stuff.
Probably the worst part isn’t people not knowing. That’s fine. There’s tons of shit I don’t know. It’s the unwillingness to remember and learn about the system. That’s pretty maddening.
Also not to mention today, your computer hides shit from you. Back in the old days (around 10 years ago) you would get an error message, something you could search and understand but increasingly all you get now is "operation failed". You get this kind of thing on Mac's, iPhones, android and increasingly windows.
And of course phones/tablets are much more locked down and you see any of the "nitty gritty" computing, just icons and bubbles.
Windows has always had awful error codes. A BSOD with some (made up) 0x00000231a would get “Kernel gobbledygook” as the search result. Completely useless. It was and still is awful. Only by digging in to logs, event manger, and anything else you can imagine you might be able to correct the issue. However, I will offer that Windows has been stable AF since 7, and I could count the number of times it’s crashed on me in the last decade or so on one hand, and the times it did crash or was because of either a change I made or a bad driver update.
I have a love/hate relationship with Apple. I despise how everything is locked down and they spare no effort to make sure you stay in their walled garden and play with their toys under their supervision. OTOH, shit almost never breaks. Regular PC? You’re free to wreck it, and I love that.
You bring up a good point about the stability of Windows. I've been using Linux Mint for the past few months and am quite happy with it. However I've experienced at least four different times when the OS has become completely locked; I couldn't do anything and had to hard reset. Not a deal breaker for me but it made me think about how that never happens to me in Windows any more.
The OS, or the window manager?
In 95% of cases, switching to a secondary tty(via ctrl+alt+f) will give you access to find and kill whatever is hanging without requiring a reboot.
You hit the nail on the head. People assume that entry level software or hardware stuff gives way to calculus before they can actually solve their problem, so they don't even try.