That may seem like an exaggeration but in my experience it's literally true.
I tried to explain to my wife what "Linux" was but had to explain what "Operating System" is first, and I don't think I ever made much of an inroad on either. It's just not interesting or relevant to her life at all. My in-laws, foggedaboutit.
>It's just not interesting or relevant to her life at all.
This is the key point I think a lot of tech people don't get. My dad's smart. He worked in pharma for many years and knows tons about a lot of the science (and business) related to that.
He just never had any interest in learning about things like file systems and so forth. A tablet for him was my best gift to myself ever. (And he now just uses a large smartphone. He doesn't use the vast majority of its capabilities because he's just not interested in them; he uses what's of interest to him.)
> He just never had any interest in learning about things like file systems and so forth.
Most people (especially today in 2020) don't know what a file is. And that's okay, or great even. A filesystem is a leap yet beyond that.
Apple takes great pains to hide the filesystem from the user in iOS. And that was probably a really, really good move. They have the freedom to change how the internals of devices use files and may have gotten some security benefit as well.
Mobile computing provided a great opportunity to enable some cool tech that breaks backwards compatibility. Like signed bootloaders, indexed-database-as-filesystem, permissions/capabilities. All of these were available on desktop OSs but haven't found a wide audience. Or hadn't, until much more recently. Sorry- bit of a tangent there.
Point being: way back when, in order to be productive with a computer you had to know more about its design. But today, many things "just work" without need to understand how/why.
"I used to be dismissive about tech issues; I started caring when I realized that tech is where the power struggles of this era will take place." -friend of mine
I love sharing this quote because it is so prescient. Sleep too long, and we may wake in chains.
My girlfriend is incredibly intelligent, but doesn't care much for computers or programming the way I do and just buys Apple stuff for its "just works" factor.
That said, I was having trouble getting sound working on a Linux laptop one day, and it turned out to be because my user didn't belong to the "audio" group and so didn't have permission to play sound. I explained this to her, and she told me she understood why that would make sense, and why someone would want to design a system to work that way, even though it is not a system she, personally, would use.
Aaaand this is why she is my girlfriend. :)
Not to take away from your wife, I'm sure she's lovely. I'm just glad to be with someone who's both smart and empathetic enough to understand why I do what I do, and why I like the weird computer shit I like. (My girlfriend on the Amiga 500 I bought: "I like this. Why didn't this take over?")
And if you try to argue the merits of one OS over another having had much experience with both, they will argue back with you even though 99.9999% of their experience is with one OS
They have to be taught, and normies learn about things like this the way they learn about much of the world: through marketing.
If the enormous hypetrain behind Windows 95 did one thing, it was to make "operating system" a household term -- because in order to care about Windows 95, people had to care about operating systems.
