Post #1275179

2026-01-31 17:42 UTC

Nope, neither a joke, nor Boomer. GenX with late GenZ and early GenAlpha kids. So no humor, just empiric observation. Just this week my GenZ son told me to my astonishment, that out of his class of 30, only 3 still have a printer at home. For my daughter in elementary school it is even worse. Mobile phones and tablets essentially have completely replaced PCs and Laptops at home. First time the kids come in contact with a text processing program is sometime during secondary school in class if they are lucky.

Replies (2)

@trolololol@lemmy.world 2026-01-31 23:14

Unlucky I'd say. I haven't touched Word in almost a decade because I've been fortunate to work in companies that don't pay for Microsoft suite, instead using Google suite. And I'll tell you, not only I need to use it very very little but also it's much easier to get things done than Microsoft products. What do I use daily? Slack and confluence. But we don't need to talk about those, do we? Gen alpha beta whatever will need those Microsoft skills when they enter workforce in corporations full of genz, because that's pervasive cyber tools in those pieces. You can talk all you want about libre Office, but that's not what man child ceo of big companies do, because they're affairs of their man child friends peer pressure. Hive mentality.

Open ##1275183
@BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 2026-01-31 19:36

So my oldest is almost to the point where I’m going to want them to have something for schoolwork and writing. They use a classroom Chromebook at school, but I have no idea what would make sense for them here at home. I’m an engineer who daily drives Linux, so I’m probably overthinking it. I do have an old laptop that will easily handle a lightweight distro, and as long as I don’t give them sudo it will probably be ok? Though I haven’t looked at parental controls for Linux accounts. What do you recommend?

Open ##2915103