this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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There was an article going around a while ago that was arguing most users these days, including the youth we often stereotype as "digital natives" who "get computers", don't understand file systems. They might not even know they exist as a concept.
Which makes sense if you've only ever really used modern UIs. You don't have to know anything about files and folders. I bet a lot of people don't even know they exist in any meaningful way.
Most users are shockingly ignorant, and a lot of them are not really paying enough attention or interested enough to learn much.
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.
My daughter certainly doesn't have a good understanding of file systems even though I've been trying to teach it to her.
We recently went through a nuke-n-pave on my kids desktops. I plugged in an external drive for them to do backups, and we walked through the process. This was in Fedora with pretty much default Gnome tools. They came away understanding the process and how to track it, but I think they still don't really understand file organization.
These kids grew up with tablets and smartphones where they don't even see the file system, so I'm not shocked.
I don't think any of the UX problems you're describing have been solved on any platform. If anything Windows is one of the better examples here, because I'll be fucked if I can ever find a file on Android and don't get me started with Linux.
You think this is easier to use than grep?
No, neither is easy to use. The second you have to use a terminal or command line you have completely lost the vast majority of people.
I agree, but are you then implying that the windows explorer file search is good? Have you ever used anything else?
I didn't say it was good, but it is easy to use compared to a terminal. It won't help you find your file, but it's somewhat intuitive to a novice user - you click around and open folders until you find something that looks like what you're after. It's not efficient, it's downright tedious, but it's at least easy to do.
It's all about the barrier to entry to novice users. Most users are novices, they're the majority of the market so they'll decide what the market leader is.
With the tab-completion in Powershell, for someone who doesn't know all the grep flags by heart, it might be easier to stumble through the options to find the ones you want without looking it up.
But it doesn't list them does it? With e.g. zsh I can have the list of flags alongside their explanation, which is not the case with PS I think? I think even bash has it on more recent distros (not entirely sure)
Looks like you can use Ctrl+Spacebar to open the "MenuComplete" function that should show you the different available options. I don't think you can get a direct list of the parameters that have explanations without using something like Get-Help though.
More info here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn/shell/using-keyhandlers?view=powershell-7.4