[Izkata]

"Digital native" is more a marketing term than anything else, and because of the age group it referred to, it ended up meaning the opposite of what was originally intended: it's people who didn't experience technology's growing pains, only the simple slick interfaces, and so don't really understand how it works.

[9dev]

There’s a difference to prior generations, though. My parents grew up with machines being brittle; you could break something permanently by operating it the wrong way. That is fundamentally different with computers: Younger people I like to refer to as digital natives have been raised on software and usually just mess around until something works. That doesn’t mean they really understand it, but the mindset around human-technology interaction is fundamentally different, and devoid of the angst of breaking stuff older people tend to show.

So my point here is that even people open to experimenting with technology will be absolutely helpless in setting up and using a Linux distribution, because the onboarding experience demands so much implicit knowledge.