That's not new.

I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block. Those who got it, didn't find it hard. It's just that some people can't get it.

The disconnect is not between some developers, and the younger folks. It is between some developers, and most of the world.

I can say for certain this is true. People my age look at me like I have 3 heads if I ask them to do anything more complex than open a web browser

not even the older generations. My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat, and my father is one who bought the first IBM PC when it came out, so someone who has touched these things for decades (tho very superficially).

I think that the software industry, especially operating systems, have completely failed to provide a balanced product between the overly bloated and messed up (Windows), the overly complicated (Linux) and the overly simplified (Android/iOS).

Maybe some Linux distros are now at the right spot, I was positively surprised by PopOS to give an example, but it's too late. With AI this is only going to get worse.

Filesystems aren't some universal truth. They were invented at a specific moment in time for specific reasons.

No. There is a disconnect between domain insiders and those that are not. This is not specific to any one domain. It's also not about age.

Some insiders know about this disconnect and fewer still can bridge it easily.

Those that cannot even sense this disconnect, they're a bit of a pain in certain situations. You know, like talking to project stakeholders or customers.

(17 yo here), I think that I am eternally grateful to my cousins who convinced my parents to give me a desktop computer which is still working right now (it had a minor hiccup in the processor recently but it works), before that, I was having a 1 gb crt monitor win7 on which I somehow ran Vscode smoothly.

I am very frugal (to save money on webcam, in online classes, I had droidcam /wo-mic setup with one of my parents old phones that were so old that online classes couldn't work or were just too slow) but spending money on a decent personal computer is genuinely one of the best investments personally.

One thing my cousins did which I am sorta grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu so my computer was really nice/smooth in everything but gaming, I still ran some games like portal series , inscryption and many other games like valorant and it was playing valorant when I started realizing its chinese company roots and kernel level access meaning that there was no proper way to guarantee to have piece of mind unless I reinstall it

So I felt like if I was reinstalling, I was watching some the linux experiments video anyway and was fascinated by linux, so I just decided to choose myself to use nobara-linux for the first time which was another one of the best decisions that I made as it opened me up to the terminal.