you should have a basic level of familiarity with the computer you’re using, same as any other tool

Obviously not, they can use it without that understanding just fine for whatever they want to do. That is enough understanding for them. If their computer explodes, they just buy an other one.

Though, if we compare nowadays distros like Bazzite with Windows 11..

If you think big tech doesnt cut corners and offloads the work to the users you are in a bubble; there's software that is secure, performant, pretty, doesn't break on its own, and doesn't have an obsolescency clock ticking inside. Oh, and doesn't spy on you dismantling society by the minute.

The charity did more than some good though.

Also, name one good historical person that didn't do at least some bad.

It is almost like things aren't black and white but more like Yin and Yang.

And this in turn led to the younger generations being less tech-literate.

Sure, and where is your proof that Bill needs one, let alone uses one?

And don't come with a list of actions the majority of people don't care about.

Nah, I have worked in IT education and in helpdesk. Average user doesn't have a better time getting into Microsoft products, it's not easier for them than FOSS. The reason for Windows domination is Microsoft spending money and lobbying power to put it in front of every user.

Or instead just not hiding things that need not be hidden, like file extensions, despite your OS relying on them for identifying types.

But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

Yet you still better know how to cook, despite convenience food existing. Hunting is more analogous to calling kernel interfaces.

To add to subignition's point, there is a value in learning useful software. More complicated software means that there is a learning curve - so while you are less productive while learning how to use it, once you gain more experience, you ultimately become more productive. On the other hand, if you want the software to be useful to everyone regardless of his level of experience, you ultimately have to eliminate more complex functionality that makes the software more useful.

Software is increasingly being distilled down to more and more basic elements, and ultimately, I think that means that people are able to get less done with them these days. This is just my opinion, but in general I have seen computer literacy dropping and people's productivity likewise decreasing, at least from what I've observed from the 1990s up until today. Especially at work, the Linux users that I see are much more knowledgeable and productive than Apple users.

Agreed. People just think the first tool that they learned is the easiest to use. I've been a longtime Gimp user and find it pretty easy to do what I want.* The few times someone asked me to do something in Photoshop, I was pretty helpless. Of course, I'm a pretty basic user - I wouldn't dispute that Photoshop is more powerful, but which one is easier to use is very subjective and the vast majority of the time, it just boils down to which one you use more often.

I've seen the same with people who grew up on Libreoffice and then started smashing their computer when they were asked to use MSOffice.

Genuinely kind of surprised they only met now, one would have thought that in over 30 years they would have run into each other at some point at some conference or other.

Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It's a part of the GNU/Linux OS

That's not how it works, it's not like "I do some good, now I can do some bad". It does not even out.

Bad people doesn't become good because "some good things came out of it".

If you do bad, then you are bad.

Let me google that for you.

It's like asking for proof there is sand in the desert

You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can't just decide to become survival hunters - we'd simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you're living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can't support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @subignition@fedia.io is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative [...] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

I can't tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don't see how "people prefer convenience" is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don't think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

Unless I'm mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn't tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn't produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

Don't get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn't come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @subignition@fedia.io that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

About that, Tom Scott is also old now.

CoClippy?

I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn't understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It's why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.