#and also as an addon i don't consider myself a proficient user in linux systems or even windows that i have more familiarity with

[futuretrain]

I started writing all of this in the tags, but then I got so many of them it just hit me it should be a whole post, so, here: i used linux (arch-based specifically) as my daily driver OS for 2 years and i loved it and it's great but it's not the solution

in fact the leap from ''i don't know how to move files between folders'' to linux is going to be too advanced for most people and make them more likely to give up. especially if a program they use and like doesn't have a native linux package.

like in my own experience i couldn't find a music player that could rival foobar for me on features so i just kept using foobar. and that meant that one of the first things i installed on a fresh linux install was wine. and some distros deal don't give you an easy way to do that. some do not even give you easy ways to install anything at all. and nobody who is not already comfortable with doing "advanced" user things on their preferred system is going to be suddenly more confident about using the linux terminal package installation process.

sometimes features that you don't even have to worry about on windows/native OS don't get automatically carried on linux distro installations. for example, my laptop's wifi card's drivers! it's not an old or obscure laptop - it's a lenovo legion. you know, a fairly popular laptop model! i had to urgently look for my ethernet cable and spent 3 days googling in my free time to figure out what driver i needed to install for my specific card and then way too much time fighting pamac over it because there were 3 different packages that had the name of my card but only one of them worked. or the fact that i searched for 2 years and still couldn't find a way to lower my screen's refresh rate, which was stuck at the max 165hz. so, you know, don't take your laptop off charging because you can't put it in a lower battery refresh rate, and just deal with the judder on movies because that's not going away. i lived with all of those issues and the inconvenience because to me, they weren't ~that~ big of a deal and at least some of them i could bypass or fix with a little bit of time. most people are not going to be fine with the inconvenience, especially if they remember using an OS where those same issues never even came up.

one thing i DO recommend people to do with linux is to keep a usb stick with a flashed linux distro that has a live mode, because you can use it without installing the OS. so if your main OS gets corrupted because of an update or anything else happens to it, you can just plug your linux usb into the usb port and boot into the live usb and have access to your files and go online if you want. on some distros you can even install programs on top of the base live distro, they are probably going to be gone next time you log in though. you'll need to learn how to access your bios menu, but it's significantly more user-friendly now than it was even a decade ago. if you, like me, have a fear of accidentally messing up your windows/etc OS and corrupting files in such a way that your computer just bricks itself basically, having that back-up linux live usb can do a lot for that anxiety. it definitely does mine!

bottom line don't offer people with no computer literacy linux as a user-friendly alternative. they WILL get confused by it and never want to try again in the future. offer them ways to learn their preferred system instead. in fact, chromeOS which powers chromebooks is a linux system. linux is not a catch all solution to computer literacy and never was

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.