Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
I remember reading an article a few years back about physics undergraduates who didnt know how to use a computers file system. They could learn, but these are smart likely at least fairly tech inclined kids and they didnt know how to navigate folders on a computer at 18.
When I studied Computer Engineering, I met several other students who had a lot of trouble using the Windows file system, and navigating a file system through a terminal was a Herculean task for them.
Most people growing up now, and since over a decade ago, are only tech savvy in the sense they know how to use smartphones, tablets, and social media; none of those require any understanding of file systems, and even using desktops doesn’t really require it that much for most people.
I’m simply baffled that someone going into a computer engineering major at a university doesn’t understand a hierarchical file system as a matter of course. It’s a tree. The file system is a tree. A tree is one of the most basic computer science logical constructs. How exactly is a filesystem confusing? How is navigating directories from a terminal - any terminal, in any OS - a Herculean task?