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Comment by hunter-gatherer | Hacker News Reader

There definitely is a sort of pseudo generational gap of how peole interact with computers. I was having a conversation with a 20ish year old the other day about computer for storage and they didn't understand the filing cabinet analogy. Like, for then everything had to be in the desktop folder, but the concept that C:\Users\User\Desktop was like having a folder in a filing cabinet, where C: was the actual cabinet, was so alien to them.

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The desktop metaphor makes it look like the desktop is the starting point. You can understand why someone who has not interacted with a directory through a terminal would think this.

My parents use their email inbox as a filing system. Specifically, a top of bucket filing system. They need something? Email it to them. Did you email it to them? Email again. They can find it if (and only if) it's near the top of their inbox.

A special kind of insanity that puts me in a mild, cold sweat. Such filesystems can come for your family too!

Worth noting, my father was an early adopter of the home computer. It's somehow regressed over the years.

Windows seems to make this deliberately confusing, eg displaying "Desktop" as the root of the hierarchy in the default Explorer window makes no sense (Desktop > Home > Desktop?). Then layer in typical corporate MS software like OneDrive, and it gets even weirder and harder to determine what's where on the local fs.

Then, you have Personal which is using OneDrive and everything else. If you have Google Drive or Dropbox then it shows up too.

Lots of options, plenty of opportunity for confusion.

That's by design. They don't want you to store your files locally. They want you to store them in the cloud... their cloud.

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