Rule

No, include autistic kids. Exclude unwanted kids regardless of anything, they’ll skew the results. The unwanted neglected kids growing up with poppy playtime and skibidi toilet are going to program games for a job after being told to go away by their entire family. Everyone else wouldn’t have used computers as often because they were spending time with friends and family.

Where there’s smoke, they pinch back.

My parents loved and cherished me growing up, and still do, which is part of why I was the only kid in sixth grade with a laptop (the other part was I had a disability accommodation with the school that allowed me to type my assignments rather than write them by hand). The fact that they encouraged my programming talent at that age, didn’t get mad when I installed a Fedora dual-boot on that laptop, and bought me the book Python for Kids for my 12th birthday, is why I’m a programmer now.

I’m sorry your parents didn’t show you the love and support you deserved, but that’s not the criterion we should be looking for.

Actually that’s also an interesting statistic to cover. What’s the proportion of programmers who learnt because they were supported vs unsupported (and while we’re at it do code quality analysis just to see)

I’m genuinely curious; is her hypothesis that macOS users are less tech literate? Because I definitely know much more computer science people that use macOS than Windows (of course most use Linux, but Windows is on third place).

I don’t understand the correlation with technical people on Mac. Like I DONT GET IT 😭
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want? I tried to use a cracked iPhone before deciding just to buy a new android because I just bout exploded with the corporate shenanigans apple has.

Edit: It would appear that Mac is very different from IOS. Ive never tried it other than 15 minutes of fiddling with a friends once, nice to know it’s not as locked down as IOS is.
Many thanks, but I hardly understand this conversation lol

The fact I had to use iTunes to put music on my phone and the lack of access to the filesystem were extreme deal breakers for me. There is also the impossible hoops you had to jump through to change ownership of a phone. I gave my mother my old iPhone when I changed to Android and it was impossible to scrub my account from it, even with a factory reset.

The environment felt way too sterile for my liking. It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.

It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.

So it’s doing security correctly.

Lack of access to the file system? What are you talking about?

how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want?

Huh? What do you mean?

There are a lot of things that Apple just straight up tells you you can’t do – I don’t use a Mac often enough to make a list, but I can tell you that running apps made by people who aren’t giving Apple $99/yr for code signing was recently added to it – and using MacOS means being okay with that.

I use a Mac precisely because it lets me do what I want. Linux is endless configuration and poorly designed UIs, Windows is an incoherent mess that needs to be wrestled back to a usable state with every major update. Mac does what I need without any fuss.

Truth be told, I have a PC for gaming and a Linux server for Plex, *arr, and home automation. But when I need to get work done, it’s the MacBook. No question.

This is the key difference people miss in this discussion. Being able to do the things you want varies so wildly but the system gets out of the way entirely to let you do things. Not sit and endlessly tweak configurations. While for some that might be what they want to do and believe me macOS also has endless configuration parameters to tweak, the class majority just want to do things with the computer as a tool. It’s a subtle nuance but you said it well, it specifically lets you do whatever you want. Editing configs for hours to customize the desktop environment is not the same as being productive with the system.

What stuff do you think you can’t do on Mac? It’s essentially just Linux with better (and more supported) apps.

OS X and iOS are completely different beasts, iOS is a closed off nightmare whereas OSX is basically just stable pretty Linux missing a few packages and costing more

OSX is ~~basically just stable pretty Linux~~ literally BSD, including licensing the UNIX trademark to make it official

FTFY.

Because it’s Unix, and Windows isn’t, and they refuse to try Linux because it’s ~~not backed by a corporation~~ too much of a headache to use day-to-day

Macs have a decent terminal + CLI interface built in, and decent hardware. Also, for many years apple offered huge discounts for students through their university, so many CS students got a macbook for super cheap and just never stepped out of the ecosystem.

The CLI interface is literally just GNU BASH, people need to understand Apple steals everything slaps a fresh coat of paint on it and boasts how innovative they are.

~full disclosure; I’m super jealous andhave always wanted a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro~

apple offered huge discounts for students through their university, so many CS students got a macbook for super cheap and just never stepped out of the ecosystem.

This is the real reason. And I think they couple it with trying to make interface look and behave not how it is in Linux or Windows, so that once you’re used to it, you’re less comfortable switching to anything else.

It’s kinda simple actually. As much as I love patching the Linux kernel or debugging it, or anything really it takes a lot of the one resource in life I have less of each day, time. Generally on macOS I can just upgrade and not bother worrying about breakage. Not always sure but if you’ve ever had to deal with python libraries or c libraries and updating source you start to go if I’m not getting paid for this crap why bother.

My entire network is almost all Linux but I generally just use macOS mostly cause safari battery life is insane. Plus zsh as my shell I live in the terminal and use emacs I can pretty easy migrate off either but video apps and audio are so much better on macOS it’s not even funny. Maybe now that the realtime kernel patches are in mainstream Linux audio can get closer to macOS audio latency but I won’t hold my breath.

I can’t speak to windows though I don’t really use it outside of work related usage which is minimal as I work for a company that sells a Linux distribution.

For tech people, OS X is basically a BSD with a pretty UI that comes preinstalled on nice hardware (which is important mainly because corporate IT procurement is only gonna give you a choice between a Mac or a [Dell|HP|Lenovo] business-line machine running Windows (and with corporate policy that prohibits installing Linux). The Mac is a much nicer choice in that situation.

Also remember that, although they’ve backed away from it now, there was a time back in the 2000s when Apple was leaning into the UNIX hackability of the OS – they were coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator and went out of their way to design their machines for toolless upgrades of things like RAM. Some of the popularity of Macs among technical people stems from that era, and memories of it.

iOS, by the way, has always been an entirely different story. Your experience with a cracked iPhone isn’t even slightly representative of the experience using an OS X Mac.

I’m always confused by people who don’t seem to understand that MacBooks and iPhones run different OSs. Why would they run the same OS?

You can install pretty much anything on a MacBook via the open-source package manager brew. I’ve been exclusively using Linux at home for almost 20 years, but on my work computer, which is a MacBook, I really don’t find much is missing. I use the same oh-my-zsh profile on both, brew install the real version of most utilities, and I move on with my life and get work done.

Apple doesn’t lock down the bootloader at all, so it’s trivial to install Asahi Linux now if you want to. I did this on my home computer because I like the screen, battery life, and keyboard layout.

install pretty much anything on a MacBook

Hardware that doesn’t fail due to “parts pairing”

I think that’s the gist of it. Apple is so hell bent on proprietary everything and keeping their hardware locked that there isn’t all that much you can tinker with when using a Mac. Aside from the high price of apple products, the customizability of PCs (and the access to games) are what kept me on windows.

What stuff do you think you can’t tinker with on a Mac?

Could be, could also be she is generally actually curious about it. I would actually think its the opposite since your problem solving skills are exercised more on a windows than a mac. Computer science people will engineer a solution from the ground up while the rest of us will problem solve and be happy with something held together with duct tape.

I think computer science is related to problem solving though. Especially programming is just basically solving one new problem after another and being able to figure out new solutions to errors you don’t know.

When I was 12 I installed Linux… and now I have autism. And I’m gay!

I’m autistic and gay but I also have a secret third thing that stopped me from figuring out linux. The “AD” in ADHD (there needs to be a better way to distinguish between having attention deficit, hyperactivity, or hybrid). I have tried like four times now to figure out linux and my brain just doesn’t get the dopamine it needs from that activity and I just can’t focus 🫠

It looks like Linux got much friendlier as of lately, and requires much less figuring out, but ymmv and you can of course run into issues, unfortunately.

Nowadays we usually have the benefit of being connected to the internet from something other than the computer we’re fiddling with, it was quite hard to troubleshoot modem issues when you need that modem to work for the internet connection.

There is a shoet way to say it: Inattentive type (type I), Hyperactive type (type H), and Combination type (type C)

I routinely describe myself as ADHD type C

There is a way to distinguish them ! There is Innatentive type, Hyperactive-impulsive type and Combined type

That’s like half the fediverse here

Weird flex, but ogay.

There’s truly not individual unique experiences.

Well there’s a simple explanation right? When you’re growing up grappling with issues like homosexuality, disability or just feeling like an outsider - spending more time at a computer provided an escape from a judgemental and unwelcoming world. This is the same reason so many of us are night owls well into adulthood, cause we grew up feeling safer when the adults were asleep and we could maintain our personal boundaries.