The modern developer mindset is that users are cattle. Explore pretty much anywhere developers hang out and ask them why things are the way they are and they'll tell you it's because users are morons. Developers used to want to actually help users make better use of their tools. Hell, computers used to boot into BASIC. Now developers just want to force carefully crafted single-purpose appliances on people so they have total control over what they do with it and can track everything for the purpose of making money. Then they lament that they are "forced" to do this. Jackasses.

> sk them why things are the way they are and they'll tell you it's because users are morons.

I call those sorts of devs "bad developers".

There's a difference between making things easier to understand and turning them into a nigh-useless playschool-brand version of themselves. The original Macintosh is what the former looks like: coherent metaphors, expected behavior, simple design. Today's "apps" are what the latter looks like.

They really are forced to do this. That's how Eternal September works.

> Why do we want users to know less about how their computer works?

It's not what we want, it's an appreciation for reality. You can want all kinds of things, like people to read documentation, not install malware toolbars, not click reply-all, not answer "I don't know" to product questions on Amazon, use their turn signals, I could go on for hours if not days.

How does making things more complicated make it easier? How does windows explain to users that folders they can see don’t actually exist and ones they can’t do?

You need to step beyond yourself.

It's complicated to you (and me, and probably literally every single reader of HN) because we understand that it's an indirection and the reality is hidden. We are accustomed to that reality and virtual folders without a "physical" root are, to us, an obfuscation.

But step into the shoes of someone who doesn't understand what a file even is. Someone that would be more at home on a tablet, without a filesystem at all. Home folder? What's that? For that user, just having a Documents folder is great. They don't need to know, nor do they care, where it is.

You've apparently never had to support someone whose desktop is clogged with all their files. They know a file by its location on the desktop, not by its name. If it moves for whatever reason, they are screwed. It is for these people, who are surely now the majority of users, that removing the link from "Documents" to some actual location in the filesystem, is a win. To those of us who know better, it took all of 5s to figure it out the first time you encountered it.

Why does the user need to know about file systems and home directories and symbolic links if all they want is to save a file and then find it later?

Do you feel the same about cars? Are we dumbing things too much down by making driving as simple as pressing a pedal and moving a steering wheel?

The "find it later" part is kind of important.

Agreed. The average user loses a file when it falls out of the recent documents list, so it'd be nice if a power user at least had some clue where it might be found. Windows "search" is also buggered, as mentioned in the article, and only shows a handful of documents and a thousand irrelevant Bing search results when you're looking for a document.

Of course. But "remember where you placed the file in this filesystem hierarchy" isn't the only way to accomplish that.

> To access those files/folders, I used to go through the root of the filesystem (Users -> <username>), but I eventually just made a link in the file explorer to my home directory.

I just don't use the folders at all, and create my own directories off of the root, instead. It's much more convenient and has never caused me a problem.

> And is that desirable? Why do we want users to know less about how their computer works?

Because we'd complain ourselves if using a hammer required knowledge about metallurgy.