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Anon updates GNU/linux
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Oh please Christ tell me that kids these days aren't that dumb when it comes to computers.
Computer literacy is definitely down in gen z and alpha.
IMO around 2006 is when you see the decline. It's the delineation between kids who started with computers, and kids that started with phones or tablets.
This is why my kids get to use the PC in the living room. Wireless keyboard and mouse, gcompris from boot until they are a bit older.
Though I am thinking of moving it all onto the htpc so its JF, emulators, gcompris, etc, but I haven't decided how I want to do that yet. I was thinking of doing NFC for login, but my youngest is creative and would figure out he could grab mom's phone to get game access.
TBD. And a huge digression.
kde neon and pam time for my kids. my 7 yr old is the only kid who knows how to use a computer in class, when friends visit for minecraft they try to touch the screen... computer literacy is something I intend to pass on.
Pam_time is a solid add - thanks!
Kids? I regularly interact with PhD students that don't know how to open a fucking ZIP archive. I've had one that thought that "SSD" was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive. I've had one that couldn't grasp the idea of 2FA. I've had one that only had a single copy of his dissertation and lost all of it when Bitlocker ate the disk.
Organic intelligence is going extinct, I swear.
I'm a middle- aged millennial going through an undergraduate university course, in my first year I had to teach some of my group work partners how to move files from one folder to another in windows.
And these are students who have chosen modules in electrical engineering, so they have more technical/ computer education than most at that age...
My bestie in my phd program had all of her drafts and data and literally everything on a single shitty generic cheap USB thumb drive. She does some coding in R and works with technical equipment, so she's not tech illiterate. I slapped that shit out her hands so fast and bought her a small durable external. Lmao
Well, could it be considered random access memory? I couldn't really find a clear answer, mostly opinions.
Wikipedia says:
So maybe?
Although that's basically the other end of "SSD is RAM".
You could also install the OS to a RAMdisk.
Gigabyte even made some physical ones in the past.
Not really, a bit further down in the Wiki article it says:
Which is not really the case for SSDs (except for cached data that hasn't been written yet). That said, yes you can use a SSD as RAM through pagefiles, swap partitions, or whatever, but the same is true for a HDD. So in the context of where to install an OS it's a rather irrelevant detail. SSDs are power cycle persistent storage.
What is 'NVRAM' then?
A special kind of RAM that is power cycle persistent but has other downsides and thus didn't really have success on the PC market?
Its not 'special kind'. Flash memory is a type of nvram. It was a test to see if you would catch on. Theres also neat things like phase change RAM, aka DVD-RAM.
Well it's special in the sense that opposed to the most common kind of RAM, DRAM and SRAM, it has non volatile storage. Which is why it's referred to as NVRAM instead of simply RAM. Saying RAM usually implies volatile storage in a PC, certainly does in the context of an OS install on a HDD and SSD, and in that context a SSD isn't RAM. Yes there are minutiae to the terminology, but I don't see how that's relevant here.
Its relevant because its primary use doesnt change how the memory is accessed. The only reason NVRAM doesnt see use as primary system ram is that they are much slower and many types have limited write cycles making them unsuitable for the job.
In the context of setting up a PC a SSD is a drive, not RAM. You couldn't pull out your RAM DIMMs and just run on your NVME/SATA SSD as RAM instead (unless your CPU/MB support that which to my knowledge isn't common). I'm not saying that flash memory isn't random access memory in the general sense of the word, I'm saying that when talking about a PC specifically RAM refers to special memory the motherboard makes directly available to the CPU, and a SSD isn't that.
Next you're going to tell me Apple Macs are not PCs.
No I'm going to tell you that is still irrelevant. The OP said:
It seems the student thought a SSD is RAM in the sense of "volatile CPU storage" and thus unfit for an OS install. And a SSD is not RAM in that sense of the word.
entire SSD as Linux swap maybe?
Been there, done that:
But that was a HDD instead.
Turning RAM latency up from nanoseconds to milliseconds!
Reminds me of that person who mounted their Google drive as swap
I had a computer class that was fairly self guided, do projects and tell the facilitator how it's good for community or whatever. All I would do when she walked by is go to hackertyper and tell her I was coding.
So yes.
They are way worse than 20 years ago. High school kids now grew up with Roblox on the iPad.
I think you misunderstand how good with computers anyone ever was. Back then if you didn't care to learn, you just didn't have one.
Now you either are interested and learn it, or you just use an iPad/iPhone. I know many, many people who never used anything more complicated than an iPad.
There was a certain period where a lot of people really had a PC, and they learned because the PC had what they wanted. Because tablets or smartphones didn't even exist yet, or were very expensive.
Yea that's something that I thought about when I rewatched Serial Experiments Lain recently. It was made in 1998 and they correctly predicted that in the future the internet was going to become mainstream, but because the only way to access it then was with PCs they also assumed that would mean that everyone would become super interested in computers too and most of the characters have rigs that would put mine to shame. Fascinating how one didn't require the other, which I think would have seemed unbelievable at the time.
Oh, they def are. Most people under ~20 only use touch screen devices. In school, they have apps for building documents and power points, so they can just do those in their phone or a tablet.
I'm watching it in my high school aged niece: she barely knows how to type on a real keyboard, let alone how to access a command line, and even less so what can be accomplished through it.
Developers are that dumb when it comes to computers. Actual fucking developers.
Fucking backend developers who can't even
git commitwithout their fucking IDE handling it for them.It's so much easier to see diffs/merges with gui tools. 90% of the operations can be handled easily in the UI.
I only need to use the command line and use the docs when I do something complicated (I still screwed something up).
I do understand it's there though, I'm not sure using it for the basic stuff would help me with the complicated stuff.
Because most of the time, the complicated stuff is just a few simple commands chained together.
99.9% of the time, git is easy. You don't need to do everything on the command line, especially when dealing with diffs and merge conflicts. But in my experience most devs who flat out refuse to use it don't understand most of the basic concepts because it's all hidden behind a layer of abstraction. That's why when I teach the basic concepts, it's command line only. At least you know what that big Squash&Merge button does and why you should never click on the big Rebase button on main/master.
in our area was some kind of job orientation school (or more the advertisement to spend 3 years in the main part).
one of the people (probably 18-15) that wanted to look at programming or system integration (its combined) said that the teacher had a magic finger because that finger managed to turn on the pc
That might have been a joke that made sense if you haven't seen the PC. When I was in high school, someone ripped out the power button which also used to have power LED in it, so there were just 4 mystery wires sticking out.
As a young person:
They really are. They get used to fancy GUIs and don't understand anything about computers.
There are still a few that are good with computers, but that number is going down.
I used to tell a story about how my boss had to call me into his office to show him how to maximize a window after he accidentally changed its size. I had to do similarly basic instructions for several young news hires lately, and most don't seem to be picking it up very well.
It's less that kids are dumb with computers - since everyone's dumb with computers when they're inexperienced - and more that they're as unwilling to learn as my grandma; I'll show them how to do something, and they'll completely forget how by the next day.
I saw computers as an exciting new thing, but the next generation seems to think of them as outdated tech.
Yes. They are.
Everything is magic to them the way it was to the boomers. Open the box, plug it in, it works, hope nothing unusual happens along the way.
Of course there are plenty who know more, but I’ve got kids and helped them build their own PCs. They still know relatively little, but their friends don’t even understand that cellphones are computers and reject the idea altogether.
They are wayyy worse