I have to imagine the Venn diagram of retirees and people who are interested in trying more obscure operating systems, has only a sliver of overlap.

Though I may end up in that camp one day. I did quite a bit of that between graduating from college and getting my first job.

I know that the industry is littered with the skeletons of "kitchen PC for Grandma" that lets a senior connect to the grandkids, set a timer for those apple pies, and do some light surfing, and that it will never work on the slurry-filled Internet that Grandma's kids actually built in their day jobs - but with each passing enshittification of the home user PC experience, the siren song of a simple single user OS that is reliable, fast and secure grows louder.

As a retired grandparent I was delighted to see that software I worked on in the 1980s was recently used to crack a Quantum-resistant cryptosystem candidate ( SIKE -Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation) in minutes.

https://mathematical-research-institute.sydney.edu.au/news/q...

( Magma is a 1990s- second gen version of Cayley from the 1980s- )

Can you explain more about setting a timer for apple pies?

Well, there are many seniors doing great work and staying up to date on all kinds of new tech and so on. But one glance at the media directed at mass market seniors and you can also see that people believe there is a huge market for simplified devices and technology. Consumer Cellular, jitterbug phone, life alert necklaces, the list goes on.

All thru the 90s and 2000s there were attempts to make a PC into a home hub. I think even facebook tried around 2018 iirc. It would be something that you put on the kitchen counter and that serves as a recipe database, conferencing machine, and a useful kitchen helper: such as, setting a timer to go off to tell you that its time to get the apple pie out of the oven.

The UI for such a thing needs to be simple and bulletproof. Windows and Linux dont meet that bar. I think iOS comes close. In another timeline, it could have been BeOS.

That idea is exactly what killed Be. Well, one of the things, anyway.

10 years later the iPad filled that roll and continues un-challenged nearly 14 years later.

Retirees built every long lasting technology we use everyday, and even invented some too. ;-)

Those pioneers make up the sliver of the Venn diagram.

The majority of them probably aren't interested in trying BeOS as a daily driver, either. More likely they'd use Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Maybe a BSD.