I'm on the older end of Gen Xers and at least the nerdier half of us not only know how to use computers, but we've seen the whole evolution of home computing since the Altair. We know in a way you never can why goto is considered harmful.
And on the other end of that, my niece and nephew are just on the cusp between millennial and gen z and they grew up playing games on Windows 95, 98, and XP. I think both Gen X and Millennials in their entirety fit the bill.
It's not just younger Gen X. I'm oldish Gen X and loads of us were programming computers for fun from the late 1970s on. By the early 1990s you couldn't really avoid computers, and you couldn't use them without at least a basic level of understanding. By that time many of us had been using them for a decade or more. It's those who grew up without computers (before they became common) and those who grew up with iPhones that have a problem with tech.
Just about every financial institution will use PDFs. Now editing PDFs, that’s slightly different (but only so slightly). Used to be you had to use a certain tech giant’s monolithic and expensive software to create/edit PDFs, but these days it’s second nature; maybe to the point that you’ve stopped noticing?
Pretty sure the only Cobol programmers left at this point are Gen X and older.
People are still on Windows because of massive industry momentum, and as the developers shift from being mostly Gen X and older millennials, to younger millennials and Gen z, things are getting progressively shittier. And it's not only due to c-suite driven enshitification.
Pretty sure the only Cobol programmers left at this point are Gen X and older.
The funny thing is that we've got a ton of legacy hardware that still runs it, mostly in the public sector. But since GenX/Millennials avoided public jobs like the plague, what we're seeing now are Boomers left to teach it to the incoming ranks of GenZs who can't get a job in the dying Silicon Valley sector.
If GenX/Millennials properly understood technology, they wouldn’t all be on Windows.
By that metric the only generations that properly understand technology are gen alpha and boomers, since they're the most likely to just own a phone and/or tablet and no windows desktop or laptop.
Maybe not understand it, but at least they're able to use it competantly.
That being said, the main reason most millenials I know havn't hopped to linux is because they don't know about it, they have software that prevents them from using it or don't have the time to set it up (I get its quick and easier now, but it still takes time(.
Computers filled rooms back when the boomers (and earlier gens) were creating them, so even a desktop isn't how they were known then. But it laid the groundwork.
Was Franklin laying the groundwork for computers as we know them when he discovered electricity? You have to cut things off somewhere for a statement like that.
That's like saying that nerdy millenials invented mRNA vaccines. A very small percentage of the population worked on them while the rest weren't even aware they existed for most of that time.
Really depends early GenZ was born in the late 90s/early 00s, and I can Attest that there's quite a few who're pretty good with computers. Mostly depends on what you got in touch with at home.
Now, Gen Alpha, I'd say, is on average proper fucked regarding computer knowledge.
Or, more to the point, the generational blocks don't really matter much for this, but there's certainly a declining aclemation with basic OS concepts.
Yeah, being dumb is hardware-agnostic. As some guy put it, "being stupid isn't a big deal anymore; some of my best friends are stupid".
It just stunlocks me a little bit as younger people have been around tech their whole life, unlike boomers, who were born before computers.
"been around tech their whole life" more like they have a locked down phone, locked down game console and MAYBE a desktop computer. It's too rounded out and consumer friendly now, you never have to peek under the hood.
Idk, most likely its region/class dependant because I had dumb phones, some very early androids, and an Athlon 64 3000+ pc and I'd call myself a zoomer
edit: before that I had some ancient family pc but it's only relevance is getting me entertained, didn't tinker with it or anything. Also my old phone's 4.4 android was my favorite because it was polished enough while still letting you do dumb shit with it
I was born in 04, I work in tech so it's definitely dependant on a lot of factors, I think the biggest being siblings/parents that are into tech. My oldest brother was into tech so he taught me a lot of piracy stuff from a young age.
Boomers have been seeing changes in communications, culture, and technology as revolutionary as anything in the last 20 years, for their entire lives. Things didn't start getting wild just recently. It has been a romp for the last 200 years.
Younger millennials down have had their exposure be primarily gardenwalled, locked down equipment. Tablets and smartphones and apps, oh my! The sort of thing that discourages casual exploration and experimentation.
it depends on the person. some zoomers are great with tech, hardware and software. others aren't. same goes for every generation. this reeks of the "haha let's shit on the younger generations" millennials have been mad about for years
Sorry, but its different this time. A much smaller chunk of gen z is good with tech, and most of them struggle with basic concepts (like filesystems). Saying this as a gen z person.
I disagree. I work IT for a living. I fix a lot of devices for gen z but don't often have to educate them on software. the amount of people 30+ who don't realize I as a random IT worker can't magically reset their yahoo password is insane.
It's always "different this time." Every generation.
Spoken as another gen Z person, I know exactly one other gen Z person who's bad with tech. The rest are great with it. It's entirely Dependant on who you surround yourself with.
And I've worked with some boomers who could use filezilla and other higher level than typical tech. There are some that are talented, but the average is noticeably lower.
Yeah I suspect what's happening is that plenty of boomers were actually just bad at tech but they got to use the excuse that they didn't grow up with it. Any gen z people that are bad at tech don't have that excuse so it seems like they're stupid, when in reality there have always been stupid people or people who just aren't interested.
And I've worked with some boomers who could use filezilla and other higher level than typical tech. There are some that are talented, but the average is noticeably lower.
I am a zoomer, and this generation as a whole is a lot worse at technology.
Its not something that's happened for no reason, smartphones become more popular and simple to use technology, and older people assuming these people will be good with tech as they grew up with it are big factors.
The 1% is causing a lot of problems, but this largely isn't by them.
I never blame kids for the young adults they become. When zoomers don’t understand tech, it’s because the adults have a) dumbed down all the tech in their lives to the point of designing and selling purely passive consumption machines, and b) sucked all the inquisitiveness out of kids ability to learn. If you put real computers around kids, and share genuine excitement at learning things and making stuff, they absorb it like a sponge.
Don't feel bad. Every generation thinks their tech is the peak of technology, older tech is slow and useless, new tech is fancy, dumbed down, and unnecessary.
Heck, I already got called ancient because I ran NSLOOKUP from the command line instead of going to a website and having their page run the command from a GUI.
I've long said that I believe Millennials, as a generational cohort, are the best at typing that ever has been and ever will be. We were the first generation where adults really recognized that we'd be using computers our entire lives and took steps to teach typing. But, so much more importantly than that, we socialized through typing. I had typing classes in school, sure, but I learned to type quickly on AIM and in chat rooms.
Earlier generations only really typed for business or school. Later generations socialize over phones, so they, too, only use a physical keyboard for school and business.
I guess I should amend this theory to include all tech literacy in general.
Early Starcraft got me from ~10 wpm to near 100. You had to type those messages fast before your base was invaded and you died. If I had been born either 5 years earlier or later I don't think I'd be nearly as fast a typer as I am today.
Same... My left hand home keys are wasd because I truly learned to type playing Team Fortress Classic online and needing to communicate without any voice chat. All the classes I took in school for typing didn't get me anywhere, but needing to warn the engineer in the flag room he had 2 incoming because I was down... That got me typing with gusto.
Honestly, these days with voice chat everywhere, I feel like I am kind of out of practice and probably have slowed down since I do more typing at work than at home.
Typing was taught to boomers and genx first dude. In fact, as a liminal i'd readily say i've had an arseload more typing "teaching" than you have - both keyboard and typewriter- and i'll wager my mother in the age of typewriters had even more.
X here as well. But 78. So i got to take advantage of the digital age without having my teen stupidity immortalised on it. Truly the sweetest of spots.
What’s up Oregon Trail Generation bros!? We really did have a unique environment for growing up.
Childhood with no social media and basically no internet, wandering or biking around the neighborhood, finding porn in the woods… then computers and video games kept becoming more of a thing as we grew, and for many of us starting college meant the jump from connecting to the internet with a modem at kilobit speeds to connecting straight to Ethernet at megabit speeds.
And even though internet communication was fairly popular in our early adulthood, we mostly made it out of college, and maybe even dating if we were lucky, before social media took hold.
And now in middle age we still somehow get to be the “computer people” even though all these bright young minds came after us. But at least those of us with gigabit internet and OLED screens can really appreciate them.
I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying nobody ever was taught to type in earlier generations. I'm saying that millennials were the first where there was a widespread recognition that typing was a valuable skill EVERYONE needed to learn, regardless of your future life path. Of course there were people getting trained to type ever since the first keyboards were invented. I mean, there were people as long ago as the 1870s learning to type on the earliest mass-produced typewriters.
I'm talking about a generational cohort as a whole, not individual select cases.
And I'm also talking about the difference between typing being a skill you learn for school/work vs something you use for socialization.
As a Zoomer, I also had typing classes, but I learned how to type because I wanted to be able to quickly send messages in Minecraft when I was like 7 years old 🙃
I write a lot on my keyboard, and have been for a long time. But my left hand is not on SDF but on AWD because that's the default hand position for gaming/shooters. 😬
Doesn't stop me from typing fast or blind though. Otherwise I would have done something about it.
I didn't teach my older zoomer kid to type. He learned on his own out of the necessity of chatting with friends in online games, played on his computer. He uses the first two fingers of both hands, and he's faster than me, who learned in school and has been a touch-typist for 40 years.
I think we're moving away from keyboard and mouse, anyway. It will be AR headsets with voice, eye tracking, and hand gestures for most use, and keyboards will be used only when direct input is needed.
Looking at the keyboard and rapid poking works fine for chatting, but it does kinda suck for writing or editing anything complex. Honestly, this is how most millennials are - fast 2-finger typists who developed their skill with ICQ or MSN messenger or whatever. Really sucks when you try to show them VIM.
This one I don’t mind. Typing is a highly specific skill that was hugely important for a particular generation of tech. I am basically never limited by typing speed at this point - both programming and writing don’t require really fast typing, and data entry is relegated to history. Now the lack of understanding how computers work, fundamental principles and skills, that’s a serious problem.
I teach high school and it's amazing to me how much these kids don't know how to use a computer. They can click a button and get to tik-tok. They read the first answer the AI gives them. That's it.
I keep telling them they should be better at computers than an old lady like me.
It’s one thing if they aren’t great at using computers to be productive, but for the love of God children please don’t trust what the computer or the company selling it tells you!
The only reason we have to rotate the PDFs is because they can't figure out how to use the sheet-feed scanner. Theres a picture embossed in the thing! And a sign that we put next to the button!
They won't fucking read it though, "I'm just not a computer person! tee-hee!"
For me, that's been the major differentiator. The Boomers that don't know basic shit in 2025 are proud of it; the Zoomers that don't know have at least been willing to be shown. The Boomers that ASK to be shown though, ::chefs kiss::, now there is a passion to learn
Unfortunately in LibreOffice all the pages in a PDF need to render with the same orientation and size :/
It adds whitespace to pages to make them all the same size, and this whitespace remains even when exporting as PDF.
There's been a formal request made to change that, but it's been years with no movement.
My son types with his pointers.. he turns 14 this month, and has already learned how to type in school. 🤦🏼♂️ Types exactly like my dad, only minus the thick glasses.
Uh, if he's your son, you might be able to teach him? Like, without my parents encouraging it, I don't think I'd have learned half as much about computers as I did in my childhood/teens.
Yeah, OK, I was thinking of my sister, also around that age, but I guess I have a bit of a "cool older brother" bonus, that her mother might not necessarily have.
Did manage to get her into Linux, though, so I see that as a win.
Classic Lemmy Linux users forgetting that access to a PC and the knowledge to use it is a privilege not afforded to most unlike budget smartphones which cost less than the keyboard you own and are becoming more and more of a necessity than a trivial toy as it was when we first had them.
Lamenting generational failures is a pastime reserved for the old to soothe their egos. If you actually care, understand the systemic reasons why young people are less tech literate and take the steps to reach them.
while that might be true for the e-waste teirs of pcs, that idea is laughable for anything actually usable. just take a look at nvidia's pricing, and I don't mean msrp I mean the actual price you actually pay at checkout.
Meant to respond before you deleted, then forgot. Wasn't trying to be elitist, just pissed off at the state of the industry. I do not disagree with what you said tho.
Bingo. I have noticed a huge downfall in curiosity and engagement with not only technology, but pretty much everything in the world. People just want to be spoon-fed and will fight you throw a hissy fit rather than just... learn or make an effort to figure things out on their own.
I used to be a part of a DIY repair space for tech and mechanics and left because around 2022 it went from fun to just... a bunch of lazy people showing up and whining that other people were not doing the work for them. And you'd explain it was a DIY space for people to self-learn and they would just give you this vague look and get angry and then complain that 'I thought you were suppose to do it for me.'
I don't know what it is, social media or phone addiction or what. It seems to be just as bad will millennials now as any other gen. People just... don't want to try anymore at anything. And trying is the only way you properly learn anything.
At that point, as silly as it sounds, run it through a locally hosted LLM
they got trained on the documentation for a lot of these softwares, they're shockingly good at error code lookup and providing correct solutions because they basically print out the help page that's now hidden by search engines
I still sanity check every answer I ever get, but it helps narrow shit down when Google or others aren't fucking behaving themselves
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $60 a year ago to take with me on a backpacking trip.
It is running the very latest release of EndeavourOS and runs it well. It can do video calls. Honestly, there is little it cannot do.
You can use it to learn to program C, C++, Rust, Python, Go, Java, C#, and F#. It runs Distrobox and Docker so you can learn about containers. I guess after using QEMU/KVM to learn about VMs. You can use it to run K3S. You can run Postman, RestAssured, and Selenium to learn about Web APIs and testing. It runs WASM. You can orchestrate AWS or Azure from it as it runs both Terraform and OpenTofu great. It can run a host of cybersecurity tools including BurpSuite. You can run both SQL and Document databases. You can use it to package your own software and contribute to Linux distro development. You can emulate older machines and even run digital design tools and PCB layout. Obviously it runs all the major modern web browsers and a couple different Office suites. It can even do basic video editing and run smaller LLMs. It can run Steam if you are happy with older games. I know it can do all these things because I have.
Without going on and on, I think you could use it to rotate a PDF.
It comes with keyboard, trackpad, screen, and networking built in. It takes up hardly any space. And it is considerably less expensive than most phones and tablets. Of course, there are many less expensive computers that would also do the trick if you cannot afford $60 and just want to learn.
I don’t think you can argue that basic computer skills are elitist. We are not talking F1 racing here.
Most people carry a smartphone more expensive than my all organs combined to be fair, at least in US.
Linux and technology in general is not that hard as long as you aren't scared of clicking everything and messing around. And I say this as someone who didn't have internet access until 2020.
Just helped build my 12 year old cousin his first computer and was forced into putting Windows on it. Now, I get that it's important that he at least understand what the "normal OS" is, but I did want to put at least Mint or something on there. Zoomers and Alpha really don't know how to navigate even the basics, though, and this kid was no exception.
Well, technically I wanted to put something based on Arch but even I know that's a bad idea for a sink or swim computer moment.
I dunno how old you guys are but just in case... Schools never had good computing classes. When I was in school in the UK in the 90s we had MS Office lessons and that was about it.
Actually the UK took steps a few years ago to fixing that. Apparently they have actually computing classes now, but I don't have kids of the appropriate age in school yet so I don't know if it's really as good as we'd hope.
The kid didn't know file systems and didn't even know not to just power off the system randomly. Granted, Linux plays by different rules and would arguably be easier in some regards, but yeah... walk before you can run.
I work with some guys much younger than me. They’re great at programming and stuff like that but none of them have ever built a computer. They seem to think it’ll be really hard.
When I did my technician course, it was still using the old program and we had a wirewrap course (I did my course from 2007 to 2009)
We had this big bread board that we could connect to an ISA slot in an old PC. A guy connected a capacitor wrong by mistake. When he plugged the ISA card in, the capacitor caught fire like it would in a cartoon.
The sad part about that is building a PC is easier than ever. I hadn't built one in over a decade and was shocked to find out that everything is toolless and just snaps right into place! The only part that's maybe intimidating for newbies is putting the thermal paste down without making a mess but even then, you just go slow and take your time and you'll be fine.
none of them have ever built a computer. They seem to think it’ll be really hard.
Depends on what you're starting with. If you mean assembling a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, storage, video adapters, etc., the only difficult part of that is deciding you can do it.
If you're talking about assembling components on a breadboard, that's going to be more challenging.
I've done both. The breadboard computer was for an electronics class in college. It was both more fun and more pain.
The part I find challenging about building a PC is shopping for components. Making sure the RAM is compatible with the motherboard and all that shit. Assembling the thing is like really expensive legos that take a disconcerting amount of force to click together.
I had about 13 years between my current PC built in December of 2024 and my previous machine. Back when I built the previous PCs, I would rely on books to research what to get. It's gotten a lot easier with pcpartpicker.com.
People are as experienced in computers as their use case is
No one is better at computers than someone else, everyone has different tasks and workflows they use them for
Computer skill isn't linear
It'd be more accurate to say someone is more experienced in their industry area or specific skill, they just use a computer to make the tasks they perform easier
Computers are so intergrated into most things theese days that it'd be very hard to find someone not using one to make their life easier and most jobs are using computers to make it easier and organise better
I felt like an idiot the other day. Customer sent in a pdf with confidential information. I needed to upload the document without the confidential information but only have the free Adobe. I normally redact the information in paint but paint wouldn't accept the file format.
I ended up asking a gen x teammate and she instantly told me to use the snipping tool which solved my problem. Thank you Gen X coworkers
Asked a user to log into a computer at work. She would have been around 25 or so about 6-7 years ago.
I was stunned watching her turn on caps lock each time she had to type a character in uppercase. I didn't understand it at all until my mom pointed out she probably always used a phone or a tablet and never learned what the shift key was for.
Still blows my mind because by that point in that user's education she had probably written hundreds if not thousands of papers to get where she was. I can't imagine her doing that without using the shift key.
Me too. They were born with phones in their hands, right? Understanding technology should be like breathing to them! But it turns out they started using it after corporations had locked it down and simplified it, so they only know how to use apps, not how any of it actually works.
Though even Sysadmin is going to be managing a SaaS cloud service or a self managed docker container on an automatically provisioned hyperconverged SAN, so its going to be obsolete in a decade. Chromebooks are where we are headed, and Google also saw the future a decade ago.
Eh PDFs are just annoying to deal with. I could do this stuff the adobe acrobat when I had the paid version in school but I'm cheap and no longer have it. If I'm feeling desperate I'll find the ghostscript command that does it otherwise I just do something horrible (for example scanning to jpeg rather than PDF creating an HTML page with both images and printing that to PDF)
From writing a limited amount of code to generate PDFs from scratch the standard is just cursed. It was using 7 bit ASCII until fairly recently resulting in an eighth of the document being wasted space. Also when they switched to PDFs being an open standard the specs went from something freely available on adobe's web site to a challege of how to send 98 swiss francs to ISO to get access.
Don’t worry, the vast majority of every generation are shit with computers. Tech-ies just think their generation is better because their friends (also in tech) are better than the people they randomly run into from other generations. It’s just selection bias. Most millennials I know don’t even know the keyboard shortcut to save in word.
Ah ye makes sense. My entire family is dumb as a rock.
They fell for the "hello this is paypal, your account has been hacked" scam even after i told them after translating the broken english "its a scam do not engage".
Unlike with boomers, this shit was your fault. Y'all refused to kill off iPhone and macbooks and chromebooks and Windows and now this is the world we live in.
As a dev, the divide between apps users and computer software users is fascinating. My mom can do things in instagram or whatsapp that I didn't even know possible.. but put her in front of a modern computer with a simple application and she's completely lost! I try to explain that it's exactly the same as her phone its just a larger screen/physical keybaord with different apps, doesn't seem to help.
Helped a Zoomer coworker build a PC for gaming and was then shocked watching him try to navigate Windows and being confused on basic things. Then I realized that, yeah, he probably never really used a desktop for much unlike us Millennials who grew up sitting at desks. He’s doing much better a couple years later so they are definitely able to adapt though!
Off the top of my head, there's pdfjam, pdftk and imagemagick (don't forget the --dpi switch) who could probably do that, after reading the man pages. Or ghostscript' gs, if you want to go in-depth.
But generally, just rotate the source material you've got the pdf from. That's how it is intended.
I've used ghostscript a few times to reduce the quality of images within a pdf, so they wouldn't be freezing my phone while reading. From ~80mb to 25mb
The folks at Corvus Belli could learn a thing or two about that when making the pdfs for their Warcrow game (the core rules pdf is 118MB for 60 pages)
Well yeah I didn't learn at all about computers even in high school, when students did use a computer it was a cheap Chromebook. I bearly grew up with computers and thats the same for most people, the difference is I have autism so I hyprfocus on computers :3
Usually when people scan documents, they will need rotating, croping, deskewing, etc. Another case can be when someone made a muti page document for printing with mixed 90° rotation pages. You don't ever intend to print it and don't want the mixed rotation.
There are tech savvy people in every generation and some dumbos. IMO the low bar for being tech savvy has nothing to do with PDFs, it's whether or not you can install a functioning operating system on a device. Anyone who can do that can figure out any of that other stuff.
I'm conflicted on this. Back in the day, I would normally say: building your own computer was the bar (which includes the OS to me).
Times have changed and all of a sudden (or so it feels) it seems that navigating UIs seems to be making people tech savvy? Quite a lot of kids can navigate things faster than I can, but don't really get what an OS is at all. That makes sense because iPads, Android Phones, Macs and most machines don't require any building or OS installation.
I've had a not insignificant amount of people who don't want to learn how to. Boomers can learn how to. I love showing old people how to use google lens.
That's unfortunate. I used to work under a boomer boss who refused to let me teach him anything, instead whenever he was confused about something on his computer he'd just call me over. Drove me insane.
But both cursive and manual stick shift (at least in the USA) are being used less and less, but computers are being used more, while literacy goes down.
I think it has to do with barrier of entry. Way back in the day, you had to be quite the hacker to operate a computer (say Amiga or ZX Spectrum). Then, with Windows XP (or 98), it became easier to operate one, but some tasks still required clever ways to solve. Fast forward to now, all you have to do is click one icon at the bottom bar, write what you want in the top bar, and you got a billion answers.
Most of the stuff I learned was because the path to successfully perform stuff required knowing lots of different stuff.
For context, first PC was Win 98 when I was 7, born 1996.
IMHO, the tone is entirely different from "millennials are all worthless, lazy, whiny bitches" to "zoomers aren't as tech savvy as millennials."
For one, we millennials don't think it's totally true, and I think it's more a point of pride, because we grew up learning technology as it grew with us, than shitting on another generation.
Smarmy pride in knowing how to rotate a PDF is sounding a lot like "kids don't know how to change a spark plug these days". Tech keeps moving forward. Zoomers are way faster with their phones than you'll ever be, and they know all the AI boosted efficiency features inside and out.
Zoomers are not, in fact, way faster with phones than I'll ever be. I clumsily use my swipe keyboard faster than they type (and they look at it like it's black magic even though I've been using that shit for 10 years now).
Also I know what a file system is. Have you tried to get a non-tech oriented zoomer who's been using phones and tablets all their life to wrap their head around that concept ? Yet my boomer mom can use it competently, and she's quite bad with tech.
The younger generation does some things better and more instinctively, true, but just like I never became a genius at electronics by only using them at a surface level all my life, and way more than my elders (and despite having some interest in it), the fact that they've been spoon fed tech doesn't automatically turn them into technological übermensch or some shit.
I write so many wrong words due to swype it's ridiculous, but it's so nice to write with otherwise. Maybe I've been too slack with it and ruined the prediction algorithm or whatever. Maybe I'm just inaccurate. If I actually care, I'll make sure to proofread, but often I barely glance.
Yeah it gets finicky especially if you write in several languages, but I think I've trained mine pretty well by trying to never let a wrong word through. Still has a hard time with repeating letters, or with words containing a succession of several letters that are close to each other on the keyboard though
Yeah, I've been swyping interchangeably between Norwegian and English on the same keyboard for years, and mixed in some Mandarin for good measure. That was on it's own pinyin thing though, might not have affected the NB EN keyboard.
most zoomers just use phones and tablets, and mayyyybe a laptop for school. they're using closed systems and never have to look at the files or anything. older zoomers may have experience if they gamed, especially things like early modded minecraft, but younger zoomers and gen alpha only use systems that do all the work for them
Exactly. I know some brilliant zoomers who are absolutely helpless with that kind of stuff. And I know some who are huge computer nerds and are just as good if not better than me with them (and I'm a professional programmer) but that's definitely not the general trend.
I am a part of gen z, and while they may be fast with some specific functions of their phone, they are useless when it comes to anything on a desktop. So many people don't understand filesystems.
2 generations. Gen X and Millennials are both of the right age to properly understand computers.
To put a finer point on it, it specifically the younger Gen Xers and older Millennials. That’s the “one” generation this post describes.
I'm on the older end of Gen Xers and at least the nerdier half of us not only know how to use computers, but we've seen the whole evolution of home computing since the Altair. We know in a way you never can why goto is considered harmful.
And on the other end of that, my niece and nephew are just on the cusp between millennial and gen z and they grew up playing games on Windows 95, 98, and XP. I think both Gen X and Millennials in their entirety fit the bill.
I’m on the younger end of X, and definitely agree about witnessing (most) of the evolution of personal computing.
I know younger millennials and older gen Z and they both can use computers just fine. The oldest Gen Z are nearly 30 now.
It's not just younger Gen X. I'm oldish Gen X and loads of us were programming computers for fun from the late 1970s on. By the early 1990s you couldn't really avoid computers, and you couldn't use them without at least a basic level of understanding. By that time many of us had been using them for a decade or more. It's those who grew up without computers (before they became common) and those who grew up with iPhones that have a problem with tech.
That would be the xennials.
Beat me to it
Everybody always forgets about Gen X
I'm sure they're used to it and therefore are all like "meh, whatever".
Yeah honestly we forget about ourselves just as often
Maybe it's just me but I feel like PDFs are significantly a less common part of life nowadays. Especially when it comes to having to edit one
Ah. You're likely in the wrong job for it then. They are incredibly popular in any sort of digital paperwork job.
Can confirm, we're using PDF for any sort of pretty formatted documents/reports we're sending to clients.
Just about every financial institution will use PDFs. Now editing PDFs, that’s slightly different (but only so slightly). Used to be you had to use a certain tech giant’s monolithic and expensive software to create/edit PDFs, but these days it’s second nature; maybe to the point that you’ve stopped noticing?
I’m curious. What other format you have to send and receive documents?
Uncompressed .BMP files from Windows 3.11 MS Paint
Tiktocks
LaTeX
If you want me to read it, you better put effort into writing it.
I tried to write my master dissertation in LaTeX. Emphasis on “tried”.
It's just you.
They have unfortuantely become a standard for sharing documents because they can be opened on a browser, on almost any device.
Trying to explain to a GenXer what Cobol is and to a Millennial what a Ring Light is and its practically impossible.
This meme is just ForwardsFromGeandma minus the 😂🤣😂🤣 emojis. If GenX/Millennials properly understood technology, they wouldn't all be on Windows.
Pretty sure the only Cobol programmers left at this point are Gen X and older.
People are still on Windows because of massive industry momentum, and as the developers shift from being mostly Gen X and older millennials, to younger millennials and Gen z, things are getting progressively shittier. And it's not only due to c-suite driven enshitification.
The funny thing is that we've got a ton of legacy hardware that still runs it, mostly in the public sector. But since GenX/Millennials avoided public jobs like the plague, what we're seeing now are Boomers left to teach it to the incoming ranks of GenZs who can't get a job in the dying Silicon Valley sector.
And just like that, Gen X disappeared from existence
Ain't nobody don't know what a fuckin' ring light is.
The Xbox would give red ones of death. 😤
😂
I'm in the middle of Gen X.
I had a class in college that was centered on COBOL.
I certainly wouldn't need anyone to explain to what it is.
By that metric the only generations that properly understand technology are gen alpha and boomers, since they're the most likely to just own a phone and/or tablet and no windows desktop or laptop.
Maybe not understand it, but at least they're able to use it competantly.
That being said, the main reason most millenials I know havn't hopped to linux is because they don't know about it, they have software that prevents them from using it or don't have the time to set it up (I get its quick and easier now, but it still takes time(.
Boomers: analogue phones and rolodexes. The nerdy ones knew Morse Code, though.
Gen X: grew up with picture books on assembly language programming
Millennials: know how to use Microsoft Word and Photoshop. Perhaps can unfuck Windows Registry keys if needed.
GenZ: “What’s a file?”
The nerdy boomers built computers as we know them.
As we knew them, not as we know them.
Well, at a low level they are still basically the same. x86 still starts in 16-bit real mode. Mice still use USB 1 from the 90s.
Mostly it's just a lot faster and covered with more layers of abstraction.
Computers as most people know them now are tablets and cell phones.
You know what I mean.
But you don't know what I mean. Computers as most people know them now are tablets and cell phones. I blame X and the elder millennials for that.
Computers filled rooms back when the boomers (and earlier gens) were creating them, so even a desktop isn't how they were known then. But it laid the groundwork.
Was Franklin laying the groundwork for computers as we know them when he discovered electricity? You have to cut things off somewhere for a statement like that.
It could be said so, but it's a much, much more distant connection than working on things that are literally called "computers."
That's like saying that nerdy millenials invented mRNA vaccines. A very small percentage of the population worked on them while the rest weren't even aware they existed for most of that time.
Regardless of how few, it was still people from that gen and computers wouldn't exist today if they hadn't laid the groundwork.
Saved that link. I'm about to end high school and i wanna do CS at uni next.
Really depends early GenZ was born in the late 90s/early 00s, and I can Attest that there's quite a few who're pretty good with computers. Mostly depends on what you got in touch with at home.
Now, Gen Alpha, I'd say, is on average proper fucked regarding computer knowledge.
Or, more to the point, the generational blocks don't really matter much for this, but there's certainly a declining aclemation with basic OS concepts.
I thought that late 90s was still millenial? Probably wrong.
I think the cut off between Z and millennial I see most often is 97. I was born in 98 and I feel like I'm in both generations at the same time
I've trained a lot of 18-22 y/os in the last 10 years and they are fine. Let's not become the boomers please...
Yeah, being dumb is hardware-agnostic. As some guy put it, "being stupid isn't a big deal anymore; some of my best friends are stupid".
It just stunlocks me a little bit as younger people have been around tech their whole life, unlike boomers, who were born before computers.
"been around tech their whole life" more like they have a locked down phone, locked down game console and MAYBE a desktop computer. It's too rounded out and consumer friendly now, you never have to peek under the hood.
Idk, most likely its region/class dependant because I had dumb phones, some very early androids, and an Athlon 64 3000+ pc and I'd call myself a zoomer
edit: before that I had some ancient family pc but it's only relevance is getting me entertained, didn't tinker with it or anything. Also my old phone's 4.4 android was my favorite because it was polished enough while still letting you do dumb shit with it
I was born in 04, I work in tech so it's definitely dependant on a lot of factors, I think the biggest being siblings/parents that are into tech. My oldest brother was into tech so he taught me a lot of piracy stuff from a young age.
Can confirm, had a similar upbringing
Boomers have been seeing changes in communications, culture, and technology as revolutionary as anything in the last 20 years, for their entire lives. Things didn't start getting wild just recently. It has been a romp for the last 200 years.
Younger millennials down have had their exposure be primarily gardenwalled, locked down equipment. Tablets and smartphones and apps, oh my! The sort of thing that discourages casual exploration and experimentation.
They are fuckin' skin masters though.
"30 yr old boomer" ....not without a time machine.
Anyone that ever pirated anything learns real quick that those are the buttons you avoid like the plague
I hope anyone who uses Google without an adblocker learns that very quick too.
Bait ads is the biggest attack vector to bring users to install malware.
They don't learn, despite phone ads using the X button (the one supposed to close the ad) to open the fucking play store page
I legit have an acquaintance 15 years my junior regularly begging me for the the best torrent sites. And they're pretty savvy for their generation
it depends on the person. some zoomers are great with tech, hardware and software. others aren't. same goes for every generation. this reeks of the "haha let's shit on the younger generations" millennials have been mad about for years
Sorry, but its different this time. A much smaller chunk of gen z is good with tech, and most of them struggle with basic concepts (like filesystems). Saying this as a gen z person.
I disagree. I work IT for a living. I fix a lot of devices for gen z but don't often have to educate them on software. the amount of people 30+ who don't realize I as a random IT worker can't magically reset their yahoo password is insane.
It's always "different this time." Every generation.
Spoken as another gen Z person, I know exactly one other gen Z person who's bad with tech. The rest are great with it. It's entirely Dependant on who you surround yourself with.
The older parts are typically better.
older gen z, can confirm! gamers and nerds are generally pretty good, but others not so much
And I've worked with some boomers who could use filezilla and other higher level than typical tech. There are some that are talented, but the average is noticeably lower.
Yeah I suspect what's happening is that plenty of boomers were actually just bad at tech but they got to use the excuse that they didn't grow up with it. Any gen z people that are bad at tech don't have that excuse so it seems like they're stupid, when in reality there have always been stupid people or people who just aren't interested.
And I've worked with some boomers who could use filezilla and other higher level than typical tech. There are some that are talented, but the average is noticeably lower.
It's the 1% vs the working class, not generation vs generation.
I am a zoomer, and this generation as a whole is a lot worse at technology.
Its not something that's happened for no reason, smartphones become more popular and simple to use technology, and older people assuming these people will be good with tech as they grew up with it are big factors.
The 1% is causing a lot of problems, but this largely isn't by them.
I never blame kids for the young adults they become. When zoomers don’t understand tech, it’s because the adults have a) dumbed down all the tech in their lives to the point of designing and selling purely passive consumption machines, and b) sucked all the inquisitiveness out of kids ability to learn. If you put real computers around kids, and share genuine excitement at learning things and making stuff, they absorb it like a sponge.
I don't blame them for being bad a tech, I do blame the ones who refuse to educate themselves on it.
Don't feel bad. Every generation thinks their tech is the peak of technology, older tech is slow and useless, new tech is fancy, dumbed down, and unnecessary.
Heck, I already got called ancient because I ran NSLOOKUP from the command line instead of going to a website and having their page run the command from a GUI.
But....its the same...never mind.
I've long said that I believe Millennials, as a generational cohort, are the best at typing that ever has been and ever will be. We were the first generation where adults really recognized that we'd be using computers our entire lives and took steps to teach typing. But, so much more importantly than that, we socialized through typing. I had typing classes in school, sure, but I learned to type quickly on AIM and in chat rooms.
Earlier generations only really typed for business or school. Later generations socialize over phones, so they, too, only use a physical keyboard for school and business.
I guess I should amend this theory to include all tech literacy in general.
There wasn't voice Chat in early games and you had to type fast to communicate and not die.
Exactly this
Early Starcraft got me from ~10 wpm to near 100. You had to type those messages fast before your base was invaded and you died. If I had been born either 5 years earlier or later I don't think I'd be nearly as fast a typer as I am today.
that's how I learned to touch type without "learning" It intentionally. never bothered using home keys but I can type at 100-ish WPM and 95% accuracy
Same... My left hand home keys are wasd because I truly learned to type playing Team Fortress Classic online and needing to communicate without any voice chat. All the classes I took in school for typing didn't get me anywhere, but needing to warn the engineer in the flag room he had 2 incoming because I was down... That got me typing with gusto.
Honestly, these days with voice chat everywhere, I feel like I am kind of out of practice and probably have slowed down since I do more typing at work than at home.
I remember trying to type really fast with a controller a while ago when my mic broke.
Typing was taught to boomers and genx first dude. In fact, as a liminal i'd readily say i've had an arseload more typing "teaching" than you have - both keyboard and typewriter- and i'll wager my mother in the age of typewriters had even more.
X here as well. But 78. So i got to take advantage of the digital age without having my teen stupidity immortalised on it. Truly the sweetest of spots.
What’s up Oregon Trail Generation bros!? We really did have a unique environment for growing up.
Childhood with no social media and basically no internet, wandering or biking around the neighborhood, finding porn in the woods… then computers and video games kept becoming more of a thing as we grew, and for many of us starting college meant the jump from connecting to the internet with a modem at kilobit speeds to connecting straight to Ethernet at megabit speeds.
And even though internet communication was fairly popular in our early adulthood, we mostly made it out of college, and maybe even dating if we were lucky, before social media took hold.
And now in middle age we still somehow get to be the “computer people” even though all these bright young minds came after us. But at least those of us with gigabit internet and OLED screens can really appreciate them.
Meeeeeemorieeees
The only generation that had to learn how to record on VHS and burn a DVD. Madness.
The typewriter generation are probably faster overall because they don't make mistakes.
Being able to delete any error makes you far less careful.
Sure, modern programs will autocorrect for you, but autocorrect to what?
Yeah, it was funny teaching my grandmother to use a computer... She couldn't use a mouse, but she typed really fast!
Microsoft word fixing tiny mistakes like reversed i and e or other very common errors has made me an absurdly lazy typist.
Indeed. I joke that I can type 100 words per minute but that 32 of them are backspace.
I can type fast, but I have to hit the backspace really often.
I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying nobody ever was taught to type in earlier generations. I'm saying that millennials were the first where there was a widespread recognition that typing was a valuable skill EVERYONE needed to learn, regardless of your future life path. Of course there were people getting trained to type ever since the first keyboards were invented. I mean, there were people as long ago as the 1870s learning to type on the earliest mass-produced typewriters.
I'm talking about a generational cohort as a whole, not individual select cases.
And I'm also talking about the difference between typing being a skill you learn for school/work vs something you use for socialization.
No, i'm not missing your point.
As a Zoomer, I also had typing classes, but I learned how to type because I wanted to be able to quickly send messages in Minecraft when I was like 7 years old 🙃
I write a lot on my keyboard, and have been for a long time. But my left hand is not on SDF but on AWD because that's the default hand position for gaming/shooters. 😬
Doesn't stop me from typing fast or blind though. Otherwise I would have done something about it.
I didn't teach my older zoomer kid to type. He learned on his own out of the necessity of chatting with friends in online games, played on his computer. He uses the first two fingers of both hands, and he's faster than me, who learned in school and has been a touch-typist for 40 years.
I think we're moving away from keyboard and mouse, anyway. It will be AR headsets with voice, eye tracking, and hand gestures for most use, and keyboards will be used only when direct input is needed.
Looking at the keyboard and rapid poking works fine for chatting, but it does kinda suck for writing or editing anything complex. Honestly, this is how most millennials are - fast 2-finger typists who developed their skill with ICQ or MSN messenger or whatever. Really sucks when you try to show them VIM.
This one I don’t mind. Typing is a highly specific skill that was hugely important for a particular generation of tech. I am basically never limited by typing speed at this point - both programming and writing don’t require really fast typing, and data entry is relegated to history. Now the lack of understanding how computers work, fundamental principles and skills, that’s a serious problem.
I teach high school and it's amazing to me how much these kids don't know how to use a computer. They can click a button and get to tik-tok. They read the first answer the AI gives them. That's it.
I keep telling them they should be better at computers than an old lady like me.
This is why Im terrified of my parents learning how to use ChatGPT.
My dad still falls for satire. It took us years to convince him the tabloids in supermarkets about Bigfoot weren't real.
He's not a smart guy. But He's still my dad though.
Your comment made me think:
It’s one thing if they aren’t great at using computers to be productive, but for the love of God children please don’t trust what the computer or the company selling it tells you!
The only reason we have to rotate the PDFs is because they can't figure out how to use the sheet-feed scanner. Theres a picture embossed in the thing! And a sign that we put next to the button!
You need a full SOP with step by step directions and big pictures
They won't fucking read it though, "I'm just not a computer person! tee-hee!"
For me, that's been the major differentiator. The Boomers that don't know basic shit in 2025 are proud of it; the Zoomers that don't know have at least been willing to be shown. The Boomers that ASK to be shown though, ::chefs kiss::, now there is a passion to learn
To be fair, PDFs suck and the only software that handles them well is paid and proprietary
Libreoffice is pretty decent with PDFs imo
From my experience, not very much, at least for editing PDFs without fucking up the fonts
I guess
Do Adobe PDF things handle all Google fonts?
I don't know. I just know that Acrobat works well, while Libreoffice barely works when editing (and in general the software was buggy)
Yeah, I've only used it a little bit so I don't really know
Unfortunately in LibreOffice all the pages in a PDF need to render with the same orientation and size :/ It adds whitespace to pages to make them all the same size, and this whitespace remains even when exporting as PDF.
There's been a formal request made to change that, but it's been years with no movement.
The Linux Foundation really should start sponsoring them.
PDF gear is free (for now) and excellent
Proprietary :-/ but might still be interesting nevertheless
Thanks for sharing
The thing is most of us cant even rotate a pdf, but we do know how to learn it.
Load up Adobe Acrobat, like the button that looks like it will rotate the document.
I assume that's the process. Never needed to do it but I have no doubt I'd be able to work it out
Please, no, have mercy. Anything but the ad invested bloated Adobe Acrobat.
“like the button” - not sure if typo or using “like” to mean “click”.
Like that button. Love the button. Gently caress the button.
like that smash button
YES! being able to google (or read) goes a long way.
truth
My son types with his pointers.. he turns 14 this month, and has already learned how to type in school. 🤦🏼♂️ Types exactly like my dad, only minus the thick glasses.
Uh, if he's your son, you might be able to teach him? Like, without my parents encouraging it, I don't think I'd have learned half as much about computers as I did in my childhood/teens.
Have you met a 13 year old? What I say must always, and I can not stress this enough, ALWAYS be wrong.
Yeah, OK, I was thinking of my sister, also around that age, but I guess I have a bit of a "cool older brother" bonus, that her mother might not necessarily have.
Did manage to get her into Linux, though, so I see that as a win.
"sure, they grew up with technology, they'll be fine"
They grew up in the age of the smartphone and apps. They never had to learn to understand technology.
I have to teach fresh college graduates how to navigate network folders. It's wild.
Correction: there are 10 generations that know technology inside and out. IYKYK.
I just aged 20 years reading that joke.
I think you mean you aged 00010100 years
What is this referencing?
The original joke as I heard it was:
Binary is Base-2 math, meaning that the highest number in any place is 1. So 10 means 2 in Base-10 math.
There's one generation between boomers and zoomers? I'm pretty confident I know who it is you're forgetting.
Gen X: the forgotten generation.
LOAD"*",8,1generationI would but i'm too busy blowing on my atari carts
And nobody taught us shit, we know how to do stuff because we had to figure it out ourselves. That's why they don't notice us. But... whatever.
X MARKS THE HIDDEN TREASURE
The Gen X erasure is real
Meh, whatever.
Gen X and Y
Classic Lemmy Linux users forgetting that access to a PC and the knowledge to use it is a privilege not afforded to most unlike budget smartphones which cost less than the keyboard you own and are becoming more and more of a necessity than a trivial toy as it was when we first had them.
Lamenting generational failures is a pastime reserved for the old to soothe their egos. If you actually care, understand the systemic reasons why young people are less tech literate and take the steps to reach them.
while that might be true for the e-waste teirs of pcs, that idea is laughable for anything actually usable. just take a look at nvidia's pricing, and I don't mean msrp I mean the actual price you actually pay at checkout.
Meant to respond before you deleted, then forgot. Wasn't trying to be elitist, just pissed off at the state of the industry. I do not disagree with what you said tho.
I understand the reasons, but so many people I've had to deal with don't seem to want to learn.
Bingo. I have noticed a huge downfall in curiosity and engagement with not only technology, but pretty much everything in the world. People just want to be spoon-fed and will fight you throw a hissy fit rather than just... learn or make an effort to figure things out on their own.
I used to be a part of a DIY repair space for tech and mechanics and left because around 2022 it went from fun to just... a bunch of lazy people showing up and whining that other people were not doing the work for them. And you'd explain it was a DIY space for people to self-learn and they would just give you this vague look and get angry and then complain that 'I thought you were suppose to do it for me.'
I don't know what it is, social media or phone addiction or what. It seems to be just as bad will millennials now as any other gen. People just... don't want to try anymore at anything. And trying is the only way you properly learn anything.
Also, people don't seem interesting in figuring tech stuff out, its so easy to just google an error message, and read what it says.
Sure, but google an error message + one or two tiny details still will 70% of the time return something useful.
Its gotten worse, but not that bad yet.
At that point, as silly as it sounds, run it through a locally hosted LLM
they got trained on the documentation for a lot of these softwares, they're shockingly good at error code lookup and providing correct solutions because they basically print out the help page that's now hidden by search engines
I still sanity check every answer I ever get, but it helps narrow shit down when Google or others aren't fucking behaving themselves
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $60 a year ago to take with me on a backpacking trip.
It is running the very latest release of EndeavourOS and runs it well. It can do video calls. Honestly, there is little it cannot do.
You can use it to learn to program C, C++, Rust, Python, Go, Java, C#, and F#. It runs Distrobox and Docker so you can learn about containers. I guess after using QEMU/KVM to learn about VMs. You can use it to run K3S. You can run Postman, RestAssured, and Selenium to learn about Web APIs and testing. It runs WASM. You can orchestrate AWS or Azure from it as it runs both Terraform and OpenTofu great. It can run a host of cybersecurity tools including BurpSuite. You can run both SQL and Document databases. You can use it to package your own software and contribute to Linux distro development. You can emulate older machines and even run digital design tools and PCB layout. Obviously it runs all the major modern web browsers and a couple different Office suites. It can even do basic video editing and run smaller LLMs. It can run Steam if you are happy with older games. I know it can do all these things because I have.
Without going on and on, I think you could use it to rotate a PDF.
It comes with keyboard, trackpad, screen, and networking built in. It takes up hardly any space. And it is considerably less expensive than most phones and tablets. Of course, there are many less expensive computers that would also do the trick if you cannot afford $60 and just want to learn.
I don’t think you can argue that basic computer skills are elitist. We are not talking F1 racing here.
Most people carry a smartphone more expensive than my all organs combined to be fair, at least in US.
Linux and technology in general is not that hard as long as you aren't scared of clicking everything and messing around. And I say this as someone who didn't have internet access until 2020.
Just helped build my 12 year old cousin his first computer and was forced into putting Windows on it. Now, I get that it's important that he at least understand what the "normal OS" is, but I did want to put at least Mint or something on there. Zoomers and Alpha really don't know how to navigate even the basics, though, and this kid was no exception.
Well, technically I wanted to put something based on Arch but even I know that's a bad idea for a sink or swim computer moment.
Yeah, schools do not have tech literacy classes and it's devastating, this is why
I dunno how old you guys are but just in case... Schools never had good computing classes. When I was in school in the UK in the 90s we had MS Office lessons and that was about it.
Actually the UK took steps a few years ago to fixing that. Apparently they have actually computing classes now, but I don't have kids of the appropriate age in school yet so I don't know if it's really as good as we'd hope.
I'm 24, and same here in the states, its horrid here too
Is it really though? I'd need to see evidence of that before I believe it.
I mean... that's how it was in the 90s too.
What do you consider "the basics"? I regards to getting a 12 yr old started on Linux
The kid didn't know file systems and didn't even know not to just power off the system randomly. Granted, Linux plays by different rules and would arguably be easier in some regards, but yeah... walk before you can run.
I work with some guys much younger than me. They’re great at programming and stuff like that but none of them have ever built a computer. They seem to think it’ll be really hard.
It is really hard, with al the soldering and print etching and what more.
I'm more of a wire wrap traditionalist.
When I did my technician course, it was still using the old program and we had a wirewrap course (I did my course from 2007 to 2009)
We had this big bread board that we could connect to an ISA slot in an old PC. A guy connected a capacitor wrong by mistake. When he plugged the ISA card in, the capacitor caught fire like it would in a cartoon.
He was dumbfounded and it was funny as hell.
Never let the magic smoke escape!
The sad part about that is building a PC is easier than ever. I hadn't built one in over a decade and was shocked to find out that everything is toolless and just snaps right into place! The only part that's maybe intimidating for newbies is putting the thermal paste down without making a mess but even then, you just go slow and take your time and you'll be fine.
Depends on what you're starting with. If you mean assembling a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, storage, video adapters, etc., the only difficult part of that is deciding you can do it.
If you're talking about assembling components on a breadboard, that's going to be more challenging.
I've done both. The breadboard computer was for an electronics class in college. It was both more fun and more pain.
The part I find challenging about building a PC is shopping for components. Making sure the RAM is compatible with the motherboard and all that shit. Assembling the thing is like really expensive legos that take a disconcerting amount of force to click together.
This is the fix for that:
https://pcpartpicker.com/
Edit:
I had about 13 years between my current PC built in December of 2024 and my previous machine. Back when I built the previous PCs, I would rely on books to research what to get. It's gotten a lot easier with pcpartpicker.com.
I was pretty worthless with computers at 16 too.
Now I’m almost 40 and I’m working In the industry and slowly getting worse again
To be fair, I don't actually know how to rotate a pdf. I re-learn it every few years, then immediately forget it again.
I mean, the ability to independently google "how to rotate a PDF" isn't universal.
Pdfsam. At least that was the best way when I last needed to rotate a PDF about 500 years ago.
Goomers and hoomers and foomers and schroomers are all alike and your generation is smarter.
I am gen z and know how to use a computer
Most of us should have been taught how to use computers in school then we expand our knowledge from there on our own
Is this an american only problem?
I'm not American. I'm also Gen z, but the older parts are typically better at computers.
People are as experienced in computers as their use case is
No one is better at computers than someone else, everyone has different tasks and workflows they use them for
Computer skill isn't linear
It'd be more accurate to say someone is more experienced in their industry area or specific skill, they just use a computer to make the tasks they perform easier
Computers are so intergrated into most things theese days that it'd be very hard to find someone not using one to make their life easier and most jobs are using computers to make it easier and organise better
I felt like an idiot the other day. Customer sent in a pdf with confidential information. I needed to upload the document without the confidential information but only have the free Adobe. I normally redact the information in paint but paint wouldn't accept the file format.
I ended up asking a gen x teammate and she instantly told me to use the snipping tool which solved my problem. Thank you Gen X coworkers
I thought they would be wiz kids...
Asked a user to log into a computer at work. She would have been around 25 or so about 6-7 years ago.
I was stunned watching her turn on caps lock each time she had to type a character in uppercase. I didn't understand it at all until my mom pointed out she probably always used a phone or a tablet and never learned what the shift key was for.
Still blows my mind because by that point in that user's education she had probably written hundreds if not thousands of papers to get where she was. I can't imagine her doing that without using the shift key.
Me too. They were born with phones in their hands, right? Understanding technology should be like breathing to them! But it turns out they started using it after corporations had locked it down and simplified it, so they only know how to use apps, not how any of it actually works.
Though even Sysadmin is going to be managing a SaaS cloud service or a self managed docker container on an automatically provisioned hyperconverged SAN, so its going to be obsolete in a decade. Chromebooks are where we are headed, and Google also saw the future a decade ago.
They know how to use technology but they have no idea how it works or what to do if it breaks.
Never judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree.
Is this a Fish Shell reference?
Haha no.. it's a paraphrased quote wrongly attributed to Einstein.
Gen X checking in here. I’m actually happy to be left out of the memes. Carry on.
I always feel like Gen X should be labeled as the "forgotten generation".
I mean that’s what “Generation X” means. We were forgotten from the beginning, forced into the long shadow of the Baby Boomers.
Eh PDFs are just annoying to deal with. I could do this stuff the adobe acrobat when I had the paid version in school but I'm cheap and no longer have it. If I'm feeling desperate I'll find the ghostscript command that does it otherwise I just do something horrible (for example scanning to jpeg rather than PDF creating an HTML page with both images and printing that to PDF)
From writing a limited amount of code to generate PDFs from scratch the standard is just cursed. It was using 7 bit ASCII until fairly recently resulting in an eighth of the document being wasted space. Also when they switched to PDFs being an open standard the specs went from something freely available on adobe's web site to a challege of how to send 98 swiss francs to ISO to get access.
PDF24 has been my savior for anything pdf related. I learned about it and suddenly I no longer hate pdfs.
Guess me and my partner are exceptional zoomers? Them having a diploma in computer science and i am a software developer
Don’t worry, the vast majority of every generation are shit with computers. Tech-ies just think their generation is better because their friends (also in tech) are better than the people they randomly run into from other generations. It’s just selection bias. Most millennials I know don’t even know the keyboard shortcut to save in word.
Ah ye makes sense. My entire family is dumb as a rock.
They fell for the "hello this is paypal, your account has been hacked" scam even after i told them after translating the broken english "its a scam do not engage".
Unlike with boomers, this shit was your fault. Y'all refused to kill off iPhone and macbooks and chromebooks and Windows and now this is the world we live in.
As a dev, the divide between apps users and computer software users is fascinating. My mom can do things in instagram or whatsapp that I didn't even know possible.. but put her in front of a modern computer with a simple application and she's completely lost! I try to explain that it's exactly the same as her phone its just a larger screen/physical keybaord with different apps, doesn't seem to help.
Helped a Zoomer coworker build a PC for gaming and was then shocked watching him try to navigate Windows and being confused on basic things. Then I realized that, yeah, he probably never really used a desktop for much unlike us Millennials who grew up sitting at desks. He’s doing much better a couple years later so they are definitely able to adapt though!
Yes you are a monolith block when born in a certain age group.
Nothing wrong with that statement apparently.
Divide and conquer.
Is this some Acrobat functionality or something?
Off the top of my head, there's pdfjam, pdftk and imagemagick (don't forget the --dpi switch) who could probably do that, after reading the man pages. Or ghostscript' gs, if you want to go in-depth.
But generally, just rotate the source material you've got the pdf from. That's how it is intended.
I've used ghostscript a few times to reduce the quality of images within a pdf, so they wouldn't be freezing my phone while reading. From ~80mb to 25mb
The folks at Corvus Belli could learn a thing or two about that when making the pdfs for their Warcrow game (the core rules pdf is 118MB for 60 pages)
I just copied from my phone and pasted to my steam deck. I still got it.
Well yeah I didn't learn at all about computers even in high school, when students did use a computer it was a cheap Chromebook. I bearly grew up with computers and thats the same for most people, the difference is I have autism so I hyprfocus on computers :3
Just think about gen alpha
I have never rotated a PDF
And I can't actually imagine why you'd need to?
But I can imagine it's pretty simple, like "print" then "print to pdf" and landscape? Or something?
This would explain why I get so many attachments that are not right side up.
I've has to rotate them after print-to-pdf turned a collection of images into a landscape pdf.
Usually when people scan documents, they will need rotating, croping, deskewing, etc. Another case can be when someone made a muti page document for printing with mixed 90° rotation pages. You don't ever intend to print it and don't want the mixed rotation.
There are tech savvy people in every generation and some dumbos. IMO the low bar for being tech savvy has nothing to do with PDFs, it's whether or not you can install a functioning operating system on a device. Anyone who can do that can figure out any of that other stuff.
That's not the bar it used to be. You don't even need to worry about device drivers anymore.
Even the most difficult Linux installs now aren't that much more complicated than XP was.
Anything from Home Assistant / Sonarr / Radarr / ntfy / MQTT / LoRa would make my current basic savvy list.
It's a low bar, being less about knowledge and more about willingness and curiosity.
I'm conflicted on this. Back in the day, I would normally say: building your own computer was the bar (which includes the OS to me).
Times have changed and all of a sudden (or so it feels) it seems that navigating UIs seems to be making people tech savvy? Quite a lot of kids can navigate things faster than I can, but don't really get what an OS is at all. That makes sense because iPads, Android Phones, Macs and most machines don't require any building or OS installation.
Youth bad, hate youth
Haha funny
This is the same rhetoric the Boomers used to keep us down.
Every generation is smarter than the last, us millennials need to learn to cope without ageist propaganda.
I'm not a millenial, I'm a part of gen z.
A high amount of this generation is hopeless when it comes to tech. There is outliers and exceptions, but as a whole, tech literacy has gone down.
At the very least, your generation has the ability to eventually learn tech usage. Its not too late like it is for boomers.
I've had a not insignificant amount of people who don't want to learn how to. Boomers can learn how to. I love showing old people how to use google lens.
That's unfortunate. I used to work under a boomer boss who refused to let me teach him anything, instead whenever he was confused about something on his computer he'd just call me over. Drove me insane.
There will be people like that in every generation unfortunately.
I'm a millennial computer scientist
This is literally propaganda
This is the exact same as boomers thinking they are superior to millennials for knowing how to drive stick shift or write cursive.
But both cursive and manual stick shift (at least in the USA) are being used less and less, but computers are being used more, while literacy goes down.
I think it has to do with barrier of entry. Way back in the day, you had to be quite the hacker to operate a computer (say Amiga or ZX Spectrum). Then, with Windows XP (or 98), it became easier to operate one, but some tasks still required clever ways to solve. Fast forward to now, all you have to do is click one icon at the bottom bar, write what you want in the top bar, and you got a billion answers.
Most of the stuff I learned was because the path to successfully perform stuff required knowing lots of different stuff.
For context, first PC was Win 98 when I was 7, born 1996.
For a while I drove stick, wrote cursive with a fountain pen, and wore an analog mechanical watch, and that was only about 8 years ago.
An exception to the rule
I mean, its an apt analogy, but its more like people not being able to use the indicators or radio/heating system on a car.
Also, where I live every young person (at least, older than 12) can write cursive.
IMHO, the tone is entirely different from "millennials are all worthless, lazy, whiny bitches" to "zoomers aren't as tech savvy as millennials."
For one, we millennials don't think it's totally true, and I think it's more a point of pride, because we grew up learning technology as it grew with us, than shitting on another generation.
This was the deflection made when boomers did it too.
Congratulations, you have now become your parents.
Smarmy pride in knowing how to rotate a PDF is sounding a lot like "kids don't know how to change a spark plug these days". Tech keeps moving forward. Zoomers are way faster with their phones than you'll ever be, and they know all the AI boosted efficiency features inside and out.
Zoomers are not, in fact, way faster with phones than I'll ever be. I clumsily use my swipe keyboard faster than they type (and they look at it like it's black magic even though I've been using that shit for 10 years now).
Also I know what a file system is. Have you tried to get a non-tech oriented zoomer who's been using phones and tablets all their life to wrap their head around that concept ? Yet my boomer mom can use it competently, and she's quite bad with tech.
The younger generation does some things better and more instinctively, true, but just like I never became a genius at electronics by only using them at a surface level all my life, and way more than my elders (and despite having some interest in it), the fact that they've been spoon fed tech doesn't automatically turn them into technological übermensch or some shit.
I write so many wrong words due to swype it's ridiculous, but it's so nice to write with otherwise. Maybe I've been too slack with it and ruined the prediction algorithm or whatever. Maybe I'm just inaccurate. If I actually care, I'll make sure to proofread, but often I barely glance.
Yeah it gets finicky especially if you write in several languages, but I think I've trained mine pretty well by trying to never let a wrong word through. Still has a hard time with repeating letters, or with words containing a succession of several letters that are close to each other on the keyboard though
Yeah, I've been swyping interchangeably between Norwegian and English on the same keyboard for years, and mixed in some Mandarin for good measure. That was on it's own pinyin thing though, might not have affected the NB EN keyboard.
whoa
I'm not pretending that is some amazing achievement though ? Imo that is a basic requirement if you're gonna use a computer
most zoomers just use phones and tablets, and mayyyybe a laptop for school. they're using closed systems and never have to look at the files or anything. older zoomers may have experience if they gamed, especially things like early modded minecraft, but younger zoomers and gen alpha only use systems that do all the work for them
Exactly. I know some brilliant zoomers who are absolutely helpless with that kind of stuff. And I know some who are huge computer nerds and are just as good if not better than me with them (and I'm a professional programmer) but that's definitely not the general trend.
Chromebooks are being used increasingly commonly.
I am a part of gen z, and while they may be fast with some specific functions of their phone, they are useless when it comes to anything on a desktop. So many people don't understand filesystems.
And the Ai boosted stuff is usually shite.
It is trash but it is going to be very important trash to know how to navigate.
No they don't. They know ticktock better then I do, but you ask them to get into app data and you'll get a blank look
"Am I out of touch? No! It's everyone else who is wrong" - millennials