Linux

So, I used to help an older man with computer stuff. He thought that there were 'wire ladies' plugging in wires when you moved the mouse cursor, and he didn't know what it meant to "scroll." I work with people now who don't know how to select multiple items at once with a mouse. Neither of these things are intuitive because all interfaces are contrived.

There is no real-world analog to a scroll-bar, or a click+drag/ctrl+click operation. This means that not a single human has any instinct with relation to computer interfaces. Not only is this the case, but over the course of a single session on a computer, a user might face dozens of different interfaces. A user might go from the login screen to an app launcher, to a web browser window, to a web-app, to the lock-screen, et cetera, and each of these interfaces will in turn have many small components: scroll bars, buttons, text areas, check-boxes, radio buttons, et cetera, that the user may or may not be familiar with.

We have several generations alive now who never received any formal education on these interfaces or computers in general, and those that did attend school late enough to receive some education were taught step-by-step. Recognizing design patterns in such a way that you can pick up and use a new interface is a skill that requires a tremendous amount of existing knowledge, and either a tremendous amount of practice, personal interest, or education.

There is no debate that most of the population have little to no computer skills. Now you can take that 70% of the population with few to no computer skills, go the misanthropic route and just decide that they are somehow lazy, stupid, or inferior, or you can exercise your critical thinking skills to try and work out why only a small minority of the population have more than a modicum of skill on computers.

For someone without a mountain of prerequisite knowledge, a task like removing whitespace characters from a spreadsheet could take days. I've personally walked into an interns office and seen that they've been working on a similar project all week, only to solve it for them in five minutes by explaining a formula. When your time is dominated in this way by mundane tasks, not only do you not have time to 'learn how to learn,' but computers become associated with drudgery, boredom, and fear, as a single mistake might set you back hours or worse.

When we ask "is X a difficult task," it's a profound act of willful ignorance to ignore 70% of the population when we answer. The fact that we have not fixed this usability issue as designers and developers is a large part of users are increasingly hawked walled-gardens, SAAS, and why features we used to expect slowly disappear from our interfaces, making them less powerful, while usability doesn't increase at all. This problem stands in the way of widespread adoption of FLOSS, it cannot be solved by devs alone, and it's going to take some serious introspection to solve, particularly when we're so quick to ascribe a lack of computer knowledge to some kind of moral failing.