this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I remember reading an article a few years back about physics undergraduates who didnt know how to use a computers file system. They could learn, but these are smart likely at least fairly tech inclined kids and they didnt know how to navigate folders on a computer at 18.
When I studied Computer Engineering, I met several other students who had a lot of trouble using the Windows file system, and navigating a file system through a terminal was a Herculean task for them.
Most people growing up now, and since over a decade ago, are only tech savvy in the sense they know how to use smartphones, tablets, and social media; none of those require any understanding of file systems, and even using desktops doesn't really require it that much for most people.
I’m simply baffled that someone going into a computer engineering major at a university doesn’t understand a hierarchical file system as a matter of course. It’s a tree. The file system is a tree. A tree is one of the most basic computer science logical constructs. How exactly is a filesystem confusing? How is navigating directories from a terminal - any terminal, in any OS - a Herculean task?
Someone going into the subject may not have any pre-existing knowledge of the subject (like what a tree is) and may be intending to learn it from their classes. Unless we require everyone to take a class that covers it first, you can't really guarantee that people have that knowledge. While people may have known it by necessity before, computers, for better or worse, have gotten easier to use for the average person and it's no longer essential knowledge. Or they may not have even be using a traditional desktop/laptop OS that has those concepts.
As for how it's confusing, have you seen the default UI for Google Docs/Sheets/Drive or Microsoft Office recently? Google's products default to a file view listed in most recently used order with a search bar at the top, no folders. The Microsoft Office suite defaults to saving to OneDrive without any folders. If this is all people have needed to use when growing up, is it any wonder why they never learned about hierarchical folders in a filesystem?
I can use file systems on terminal with my eyes closed, as long as it's not windows because every release they change everything around. You're victimising the victims.
Eh? Nothing significant has changed about the windows file system in over a decade, at least not from a user standpoint.
Most people don’t need to muck about in ProgramData, Program Files vs Program Files (x86) is pretty minimal, though admittedly you may need to check both if you’re unsure which the app you’re using is. I suppose %appdata% has changed, and one could argue it was significant, but in all honesty the concept of local vs remote should get you where you’re going, and worst case you check both.
But the base directory structure has been pretty static for a long while now.
Makes sense, I haven't booted windows since 2013 and couldn't be happier
I still stand by my statement: windows filesystem changes too often.