How? I grew up with Windows, learned decent skills on that, probably as much as I would have on a Mac. The current mobile era stuff has put alot or control and grit away, for making things 'more accessible'.
Windows would do just fine. But the state of cheap Windows laptops is abysmal, and Windows as a product is in the doghouse lately because... well, I honestly don't know why Microsoft is doing what they're doing, but from the outside they certainly do appear to want to ruin Windows.
I've been a windows/linux/mac guy since forever (I do not care at all about the OS, I just care about getting shit done), and Windows is worse than the XP and 7 days, but not by much. A caveat here is that I'm assuming windows people are savvy enough to know about massgrave, and as such remedy 90% of the shit experience with vendors filling up an otherwise acceptable OS with a bunch of garbage.
The only thing in Win11 user experience wise that absolutely drives me up a wall is the new right click menu forcing me to hold shift to get the usable menu instead of the "Win 11 is smart and this new menu UI is easier to use" menu.
Other than that, it feels like win 10 (and 7 for the most part) for anything else that matters (for a normal user).
All of that being said, yes, the experience of a naive consumer buying a windows laptop is awful, but not due to the OS itself, rather the amount of bloated useless shit vendors ship with the installed OS.
Chromebooks themselves can actually be great machines for hacking (in the traditional sense, not the modern security/jailbreaking sense). E.g. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en is arguably better than a direct typical Linux install because it's an isolated environment which won't break the main function of the device as you tinker.
As the page notes though, the real problem for kids is the devices are of course locked down:
> Important: If you use your Chromebook at work or school, you might not be able to use Linux. For more information, contact your administrator.
The more common "modern" definition popularized in the ~90s lacks the non-malicious meaning regardless which side of the "did hacker originally include both usages or not" debate one sits on. That doesn't mean the original definition ever went away though of course!
They don't have an open source kernel. You can't recompile the kernel or build your own device drivers. I'm not sure what you mean by "learning about computers", but I personally find being able to peek into the kernel source code to be more educational than anything in the mac ecosystem.
The hardware here is incredible, but it's crippled by not adequately supporting Linux, BSD, or any other properly open source kernel you can compile and install yourself. A good learning environment doesn't put up immovable barriers like "you need a kernel signed by apple", it lets you push away barriers when you're ready, like "Are you sure you want to turn off secureboot, or install your own secureboot keys"
The parent commenter said "learning about computers". Most "professional developers" don't learn about computers, they learn enough react to get a paycheck, but don't have an insatiable curiosity about how the whole computer works (i.e. the "hacker spirit").
Professional developers are not what this thread is about. It's about curious kids, about hackers, and that group does peek at kernel source code (as well as everything else).
I’m fairly confident that the Venn diagram of (a) nine-year-olds that are playing with a computer and (b) people who claim that access to kernel source code is a prerequisite to “learning about computers” is two circles that are barely touching.
It's something you never need to look at, until suddenly you do and then it's invaluable. Any time you format some data for another system and get a cryptic error code back, looking at the source code becomes invaluable.
> You can't recompile the kernel or build your own device drivers.
I just don’t think this is what, like, nine-year-olds are looking for in a computer.
In any case, at least it’s good that they’re starting with macOS over Windows! Puts them on a good path to understanding that POSIX is the One True Paradigm and therefore makes them much more likely to compile their own kernel in the future.
My curiosity for all things computer related was boundless, but I eventually tinkered with Linux but only because I’d had been exposed to a *nix style command line from the comfort of an OS X desktop first.
By then I had started messing around with code but had only built toys and extremely basic tools and would’ve been lucky to write a moderately functional desktop program using high level libraries (which didn’t happen for several more years).
Writing drivers or poking around in kernel code was so far beyond the scope of capabilities at that point that you would’ve had better luck teaching your dog how to knit. I don’t think I could’ve had any chance at doing these things until at least my mid 20s.
> Writing drivers or poking around in kernel code was so far beyond the scope of capabilities at that point that you would’ve had better luck teaching your dog how to knit.
I get the feeling a whole bunch of teenagers have written drivers to cheat in Fortnite/whatever other game - with that being said, probably not at 9 years old.
