Surely.
I don't get why you folks have to be so rude. It diminishes your argument. I was with you until you had to poke fun at me. I'm a human being capable of making mistakes and reevaluating my ground truths. Why be like that?
> patting themselves on the back
While there's a lot of nostalgia in my anecdote, it's mostly spurred on by my dislike of platformization and centralization. I think they produce many negative externalities.
But thanks, now I'll clam up and stop talking about my personal experience.
Then there is the entire linus tech tips make a cool RGB flashy gamer computer and poke at shit, where those kind of tech youtubers make get a million views per video.
Or buy a rasberry pi at 13 and poke at linux on the internet.
You have to realize, that even back then, only %0.5 of a school population is going to be into computers enough to install linux on anything. At my small high school, I was the only one basically.
I happened to run my own phpbb/vbulletin forums as a kid and I can confidently say I was the only kid even close to doing that in my high school. I also didn't need to know anything to do it except press buttons on CPanel and phpmyadmin, things I didn't really understand. And I was scared to tell other guys at school about this stuff because I'd be an instant loser. Even in uni I rarely met anyone with those interests.
Meanwhile, these days, it's completely cool to spin up your own Discord server for your friends. It's totally mainstream to be into that sort of thing. Even gaming is cool now. And there's more kids these days doing more of what the grandparent post glamorizes because it's more accessible than ever.
I'd be surprised if grandparent commenter was even working off any real experience with modern kids and instead just wanted to glamorize their own nostalgia. I mean, surely modern kids aren't as cool as he was.