alt Hacker News> Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.
Yep. I was amazed when I was talking to a friend who's a bit younger (late 20s) and told him about a fangame you could just download from a website (Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, for the record) and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
I suspect most adults these days are like this; their computing experience is limited to the web browser and large official corporate-run software repositories e.g. app stores and Steam. Which ironically means they would do just fine on Linux, but there's also no incentive for them to switch off Windows/MacOS.
To them, Microsoft and Apple having control of their files and automatically backing up their home directory to Azure/iCloud is a feature, not a problem.
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To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.
> he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet.
It's quite concerning that you frame this as a bad idea.
> and he was skeptical and concerned at the idea of just downloading and running an executable from somewhere on the internet
Ironically, being concerned and skeptical about running random executables from the internet is a good idea in general.