I have a niece that literally did not know how to turn her Thinkpad off. The selected power profile puts the PC to sleep when the power button is pressed and closing the lid is set to do nothing.

She's part of Gen-Z and I can understand why she doesn't know any better. She spends the majority of her time on phones and tablets, and this is her first genuine PC that she's spent an appreciable amount of time on. I suppose I'm lucky that computers were not easy to use when I was growing up and that I necessarily had to become comfortable using the command-line and toying with the nuts and bolts of how the operating system does things.

You have a niece who didn't know how to turn her ThinkPad off.

Unless she has one of those boutique gender identities.

Whoops, I've got some bad English today. Fixed.

And even people opining that it’s time to do away with them.

I implore you: spend a few days at your local public library offering basic tech support. There's a reason why you see arguments for doing away with the traditional filesystem -- there's a large cohort of users for whom it's genuinely difficult to use.

I would just spend the entire time apologizing to everyone.

This isn’t what we thought would happen …

We didn’t mean for it to be this way …

I’m sorry they’re doing this …

A high percentages of users don't and never did understand file trees and how to navigate them. They find their files by rote repetition and spatial memory. This is how people end up with desktops covered in files and directories—that's how they find stuff, and the notion you can start in one of those directories and move around until you're in one of their other on-the-desktop directories is foreign. It "is" in a particular place on their desktop, in their mind.

I did and do understand file trees and how to navigate them, and I think they aren't good. They are a carryover from the physical world of "a place for everything and everything in its place" which means you need to remember which room and cupboard and shelf everything is, go there, open the cupboard, and get it.

In a computer, it can be "anything you want appears wherever you are, when you need it". This is hugely more convenient. Let the computer deal with storage (and versioning) similar to garbage collection dealing with memory management. Locate on Linux and VoidTools Everything on Windows let you conjour things up without caring where they were stored, and increasingly photo libraries let you search by the content of pictures rather than the filename. Full-text search is also imaginable although on Windows it's not been good enough to use for years.

The idea that the ever-growing list of things I use a computer for should take an ever-growing amount of space in my head to remember where everything is, is a bad idea. "Everything" tells me my comptuer has roughly 1.4 million files; most of them were put there by installers, not directly by me. If I can not-care about the location and storage of ~99% of them, why can't I not-care about the storage arrangement of 100% of them?

>If I can not-care about the location and storage of ~99% of them, why can't I not-care about the storage arrangement of 100% of them?

Because this 1% are files that actually matter.

There's always a more ignorant user. I don't find this argument persuasive. The non-filesystem-centric data storage systems I'm familiar with are far worse. Instead of portable files which you can do with as you please, you're confined to preconceived integrations that developers thought of, like iPhone apps that let you "share" information with other apps.

Computer education (and educators) are often terrible.

I think there is a large part of certain generations who were taught poorly by people who didn’t like or understand computers, so it’s not surprising that people that have poor education have poor understanding of computers.

I've had users get completely lost when their screen res changed and all the icons got rearranged.

I don't think so, everyone I know can use "ls" and "cd" and has Show Desktop Icons off (if using Windows)

Then you only know power users and computer geeks.