It feels like of bleak to discourage childish computer tinkering on a website named "Hacker News". Not entirely sure what this says about the direction of this website.
Honestly the direction of this website in recent years seems to be highly paid wage slaves bitching about not being highly paid enough. It has merely followed the direction of the industry. 15+ years ago the industry was smaller, pay was lower and you still had to be kind of a nerd or an iconoclast or something to get into it. Now it's filled with people who have no love for the tech and frequently even no knowledge of it, just showing up for the buck. So many people on HN now seem like people who would never start a business.
These kind elitist comments surprise me. Tech should make one humble, you seem to have gone the other way round. This was the kind of condescending behavior I was talking about in my comment, and you just proved my point. Calling others 'highly paid wage slaves' and thinking they have no love for tech without even knowing them because they criticized your favorite OS? It can't get more lower class than that. And what has 'loving tech' got to do with starting a business? So only those who start a business are worthy of being on 'Hacker News' in your esteemed opinion?
Dude, someone wrote a blog post about how they wanted to set up a machine for their son because, I quote his post (which was a fun read), "I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install."
I pointed out that Linux was the perfect OS for this and your reply was that you hate using Linux on your corporate job because you have to do all those things. I mean fine you can hate it, it's not right for your job, OK. But in addition to being negative, you were off-topic. It spawned a bunch of guys debating the merits of Linux in a corporate office which is not the freaking topic of the blog post and to the extent you want to rattle on about it, you're arguing with a straw man. It shouldn't be a huge surprise you got flak. Sorry if this comes across as elitist but in the context of what this post was about I don't really care that Linux sucks in your office, I did not suggest you should use it there.
What Linux won't do is shove mass shootings and Tiktok ads down his son's throat. Again I quote the post: "What the actual fuck? That kid is 10, and TikTok is one of the things I am actively trying to prevent from getting into his world as long as possible." I maintain: Linux sounds great for this guy and his son.
I'm totally for computer tinkering, but at the age of learning something like 'MIT Scratch' or even C/C++/Python, if they have to deal with all these problems, a lot of potential computer scientists might actually get discouraged and end up giving it all up thinking 'Computers' are very difficult.
This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.