Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

The truth is I am now actually incompetent to help my Windows-using family and friends. The answer is that I really can't help, no matter how much goodwill applies.

I recently poked at a friend's Windows10 machine that was having networking issues (probably DNS or proxy settings)... couldn't even find the right sort of settings to paly around with. The whole thing is a mystery wrapped in an enigma to me and causes me to break out in a rash when forced to deal with it.

To come back to the GP's original point: Windows assumes a level of control over the hardware (accompanied by a level of ignorance from the user) that I find intolerable. After all, I paid for that hardware; surely I get to control it? ("Not so!" says Windows.)

View on HN

What? Really? If you're being placed in front of a different OS than what you use you loose basic troubleshooting capabilities?

Look, I'm not using Windows nor OSX very often, when people ask me for help, I mostly start out as helpless as them. But programmers (or generally computer literate, or whatever you wanna call it) seem to have way better searching skills, even for things they have no idea about.

So yeah, helping people with the windows/osx setup sucks, because I'm completely lost. But if you're a linux user, you're probably used to searching for knowledge in order to gain it. This also works for others OSes.

I'd understand if you don't want to help them out of principle, but please don't call yourself incompetent when so many people have it so much "worse". Mention "DNS" or "proxy" and they'll think you're speaking yiddish.

Yep. I haven't used any version of Android since 6 or 7 and I can still use Google to find out where certain settings are.

Windows 10 now being a rolling release is making things even harder. Even if you do learn how to do something, you have no idea how long that method will remain viable or if features will be removed.

I find myself relying more and more on Powershell in Windows and using the Terminal in Mac OS X/OS X/macOS when I have to use these operating systems so I don't feel like a bumbling fool when someone asks for help fixing something. More than once I've had someone wonder out aloud that they thought I knew how to use computers when using the GUI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com