I call bullshit. Loblaws steals a killing in profits pretty much every year - even through COVID. They don't need to raise shit - the tariffs are just a scapegoat for their greed.
"Watering down" is the MS approach to design - take all the power user features, and make them less useful and less efficient to use (or just get rid of them altogether). It's a slow burn to "Take that to the nearest certified Microsoft Store so they can repair it for you".
The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus. Hell, look at the Printers dialogue in Windows 7 and prior, then compare that to the trash they've thrown in Win 10 and 11. Everything is designed to look flashy, and be as impossibly inefficient to use. But it looks less intimidating, so stupid users love it!
Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot.
Not sure where you're from, but when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. I also don't get a flu shot for several hours a day several days a week. Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it's for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved. That said, I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking "what's a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?" Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask "What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?" I can't say the same about people in 2025 who say "What's the start button?" or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.
Also, if you consider the amount of marketing and exposure to computers that people have had by now, yes, I would expect just about everybody to know what the fuck a Start button is. Shit, if you hold your mouse over it, I'm almost certain it even pops a tooltip that says "Start". Some of these people have worked at this same company for decades, and have no doubt touched generations of Windows software.
As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you're accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn't be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn't quite sure how to navigate through something that isn't as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you're "not very competent with pencils and paper".
Well, lucky for them their fields aren't under constant attack by droves of idiots constantly being catered to. There is no watering down of those fields in the name of "user friendliness".
Also, they don't expect people to understand their field, but people don't interact and touch legal stuff or doctor stuff on a daily basis like people do with computers. If they did, then they would no doubt feel the same way about idiots who can't grasp the basics and refuse to learn the slightly more advanced shit.
It's 2025. There's no reason for anybody - but especially the older group - to not know what the start button is, or keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, for example.
I actually get frustrated when I don't know how to do something and will spend the time to figure it out... So I may not be well versed in all those points, but I have at least some skill and knowledge in each section.
We don't all have the same 24 hours, but we should all have the same ability to at least refer to and/or seek out information to get us some understanding of what we're doing, and yet, here I am in 2025 working with people who are 30+ years old asking me "what's the Start button?"
Nah, I get that we're all good at different things. But people should be good at doing basic research and troubleshooting.
We use computers all the time. Many of us use cars all the time. And we know how to fuel them up, check and top-up oil, add wiper fluid, check coolant, etc. There's also the manual to refer to if we don't know.
Same shit with PCs. But people aren't willing to put in the bare minimum effort to do shit, and companies take advantage of that to ruin it for everyone.
Because we keep feeding them stupid pills and encouraging them not to think. Microsoft was a pioneer of the whole "water down software and call it user-frienfly'" thing.
Or users could maybe learn how to do things without having their hands held and treated like babies every step of the way; or at least how to search for information to find what they need... 🤷🏻♂️
Do you mean the ability to backup and restore your launcher config? If so, it doesn't get more minimal and awesome than T-UI
You'll want the F-Droid version as it is the most complete. It hasn't seen an update in ages, but it really doesn't need one. It's also all open-source, so you could always download the code from GitHub and do whatever you want to it
It's been a while since I've been in that situation, but I used to just make a common folder /steam and create a group with access to it. I'd then grant all users access to that group. Seemed to work fine?
If you can recall back to around 2010 or thereabouts, there were rumours of US telecom provider Verizon entering the Canadian market. The big three Canadian pieces of shit spent MILLIONS on advertisements crying about facetious bullshit that pretty much nobody believed. Verizon ended up noping out anyway, presumably because of how shit our infrastructure is.
They could have spent that money to improve their service and be companies people actually want to deal with... But nah.
Banks are the fucking worst for this. I assume it's because they're built on some 500 year old CICS mainframe.