Whenever I get to use windows and I face their byzantine directory structure, I wonder how people put up with that shit.
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
This is one of the biggest issues with corporate operating systems. Back in the day you booted up a computer and you got a black screen with a terminal. You had to know how things worked if you wanted to use the computer.
Today, you boot a computer and it’s simple enough that anyone with eyes and fingers can operate it. People hand iPads to babies, and even they can figure out how to navigate YouTube.
People have convinced themselves that this is “using a computer”, rather than being given a dumbed-down entertainment device designed specifically to exploit them.
People respond negatively when you suggest switching to Linux, because they fear they might actually have to learn something about how the Computer works, and never stop to understand that their illiteracy is the reason that the corporate operating systems they use suck so much.
If you exercise no power to change anything, they can shove as many ads as they want down your throat.
I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function
Unironically one of MS Word (and Google Docs)'s better features. Its easy to lose track of where you save a file when you’ve got a bunch of them open at once, and the ability to recall recently opened files and search by file name is a lifesaver.
People don’t know what files and folders are anymore.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.
On my Android phone the Android phone I have, I find it hard to tell where the stuff I downloaded is.
Until I connect it to the computer and see the directory structure easily.
The Files app seems to be trying to do some kind of Abstraction over here.
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
On Windows you end up with 32-bit binaries in the 64-bit Program Files folder, and vise versa. You end up with files saved arbitrarily to three different application data directories, and sometimes your Documents folder, so sometimes the registry, why not? Should we put several folders full of drivers directly on the root of the C drive? Of course, where else would they go?
