Posting something on your own blog is hardly announcing to the world. Maybe you should have closed the tab, instead of announcing your disdain for the author to the world.
This is either satire or a really cringeworthy personality.
That's from the doctors article but the linked one clearly says he has an Android phone. He smells like a younger Stallman wannabe.
If it's a child asking for help, obviously then just help them, and teach them how to use problem solving techniques if they're old enough.
If they're adults, then you send them to a local IT support shop, or charge them normal rates for your own time. When the cost of ownership begins to exceed the technical literacy of users, the market may start to correct for some of the exploitation of consumer ignorance.
A large number of adults have no business owning anything more complex than a rotary phone.
It's immensely liberating to cut loose the users in your life when they begin to treat you as free tech support. It's also a really cool thing when people start to think for themselves and learn really basic troubleshooting by searching our watching videos.
Even more liberating, though, is to take a principled stand, whether it's over privacy, free software, or whatever aspect of tech you feel strongly about. Sorry, I won't even visit for family dinners if you've got a Facebook portal or Amazon echo in your house. You can opt out of the panopticon, and I'll gladly give my time helping you do that, but other people don't get to opt me in to unaccountable surveillance networks.
This guy's friends and family aren't entitled to his time in service of Microsoft products. Good on him for drawing a line in the sand.
>>Sorry to be blunt, etc...
Never do anything for free, and don't bend your principles or allow yourself to be used, even by family. The world would be a better place by far if fewer people got taken advantage of, and more people held to their values.
It's a complete waste of time to roll back updates and drivers because Windows does something stupid by itself or makes very clickable popups to fool people.
It's 2021 and Linux supports 99.999999% of software on the planet. Use it.
For the record, I use Linux since 1994 when I did some dev for the kernel (not anything fancy, just some variations of code for a NIC). I use it since on all my servers.
I also try, about once a year , to use it on the desktop for a week. It is pure torture, a system that is not even half baked for interactive usage.
You can't seriously claim that when there are lots ( millions? Tens of millions? Who knows) of people running various Linux distros as daily drivers. Hardware support can be spotty in some places depending on the specific hardware vendor ( but funnily enough old stuff works better under Linux than under Windows), and some things might not be as polished, but "pure torture" and "not even half baked" is a terrible exaggeration doing nobody any favours.
For the record, I've been running Ubuntu since 2017 on a Dell XPS 13 ( not developer edition). I have the occasional bug ( mostly with third-party stuff like Teams, or the VPN client breaking my DNS config (it also does than on macOS), but sometimes if i connect more than 4 Bluetooth devices reconnecting one of them takes ~10s instead of <3s), but overall it works, the tooling i can ise natively ( Dockers, etc.) is awesome and I'm happy with it. And anecdotally, I've had less issues than some colleagues with Windows (also Dells) or macOS.
Linux is great from a terminal. Using it as a daily OS with GUI is terrible. Every time I talk to someone who claims otherwise they end up dropping some sort of “sure, well _x_ took some work” or “well I don’t really care about _x_ anyway”.
Maybe not bamboo splinters under your nails torture, but extremely unpleasant.
There are OSes and DEs designed to be easy for newcomers ( Pop OS, Cinnamon, etc.).
Again, it isn't perfect, but no desktop OS is.
Ooh, new idiom! The dot product of "roll my eyes" and "roll up my sleeves": to privately steel oneself to repetitive, ridiculous, and preventable work.
>This is not that different from them telling me, 40 years back, to not do this and that. And me still doing it
That's exactly it. The patterns and behaviours that they yelled at and fought with us about were harder to adopt than those which they demonstrated with quiet grace.
Or "oh, non-native speaker of English"!
> The patterns and behaviours that they yelled at
I do not know how your childhood was but mine was without yells, but with extremely patient parents with two energetic boys.
Said boys now try to be alike to their own children, and understand what parents went through. So they avoid being the assholes who will say "if you do not move to linux, fuck off" (this is how I read the article, at least, with my limited understanding of English)
Not everyone is Windows or MacOS expert. I do programming for 30 years. Las time I used Windows was 15 years ago. I never used Mac (maybe like 3 hours total).
> If you do not want to support your family, fine - no need to announce it to the world
It's the difference between being willing to give your kid a ride to sports practice vs a crack den.
You do want to support your kid, just not enable them if they're going to be doing bad things.
Not all "bad things" are equivalent, as I hope you are aware.
However these are all life decisions, whether to be a helpless tech illiterate end-user or at least know how to navigate around a computer. If you want to learn how to use a Linux distro, then I will help you learn a valuable skillset, but if you want me to enable you to become a helpless end-user who doesn't know how to troubleshoot basic problems then I refuse to do it in my free time.
At work I'd help anybody, but that's because I'm being paid to be helpful to my team and reach its maximum efficiency and work isn't the right place to stand by your ideals.
Why deal with that? No thanks.
> So, when my mother, sister, brother, or anyone else comes to me begging to have his or her computer fixed
Sorry to be blunt, but you sound like an terrible person with an over-dimensioned ego.
If you do not want to support your family, fine - no need to announce it to the world. You are free to do that of course, but you have to bear the consequences of people saying "what a [put your favourite expletive here]" instead of "what a wise person to battle against mighty [put your least-favourite tech here]".
I support my parents with their tech even if it is often full of things I would not have used. I roll my eyes up and fix it. And ask them not to do this anymore, and they still sometimes do.
This is not that different from them telling me, 40 years back, to not do this and that. And me still doing it. Boy, I am really, really glad they did not decide to stop supporting me until I grow up :)
Honestly, read what you wrote again and take a step back to say "ok, this sounds really bad".
PS. when you gain back a lot of time for not supporting these technical noobs, make sure to fix your site that has plenty of problems - it does not look good for an "Itinerant Engineer" who built the impressive number of 11 web sites.