My dad has used an iPhone and an iPad for years and occasionally uses a Mac at home. He's not terribly old and is fairly competent with tech. One day he randomly said to me, "I'm afraid about when I'm older. I won't be able to understand how to use my devices because they've become so complicated and keep changing every year."
And I realized it's so true. Removing the home button on the iPhone and iPad was a massive mistake. It's the one interaction my 85 year-old grandma who doesn't understand computers could interact with. She couldn't even change the volume, but she knew that one button on her iPad exited things.
When I set up a new Mac, I wanted to display the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar for quick pairing because it wasn't there by default. When I searched online for how to add it, I got four different results for the past few years of MacOS updates that kept changing where the setting was. When I updated my Mac the other day, the Bluetooth icon was gone again! Once again, I had to search for how to add it to the menu bar because that setting is not located within the Bluetooth settings page. When I went to see how I could display if I was using Ethernet in my menu bar, I discovered that I needed a third-party app and had to spend time researching which one to download.
Meanwhile I get all of those features on KDE out of the box, and any more niche changes I want to make are much easier to discover because the settings and UI have looked the same for years. KDE is so simple. I'm currently using arch Linux, which is wonderful for me but will certainly be more complicated for the average user. That's where I'm very excited for KDE Linux[0]. Switching to KDE has been a revolution. I know more about computers than most people I know. And yet I feel like I possess significantly less domain-specific knowledge than my mom who is a MacOS power user or my dad who uses Windows at work. My mom's knowledge of macOS is impressive, yet I don't need half of that expertise to use KDE. It's the same feeling I had when I switched away from accounting where people were writing insane formulas, using VBA macros, and Alteryx to software engineering where I learned python and could write twenty lines of code to accomplish the same task. However, KDE is even easier to pick up than a programming language!
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about phones or tablets or what to tell my dad. He's starting to think he should go to the sessions at the Apple Store every time a major update releases annually, which significantly changes his daily-use devices. The regular crowd at those events is normally the elderly who grew up without computers. My dad doesn't quite fit in. But Apple has built devices that require you to have grown with every iteration and built up a deep level of context. Every time he upgrades his iPhone after five or six years, the new phone is unrecognizable to him.
Apple famously had a mouse with one button. Begrudgingly, they accepted the right click despite it being a less than intuitive interface. They've taken that design pattern to the extreme, and it has infested their approach to everything. The designers are too much of Apple experts to understand how far they've gone with the context requirement for successfully navigating their devices.