Quazatron

Yes.

For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you’d be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.

In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small Lego^TM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I’ve worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud… Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.

I had erased that information from my memory. Also it took a long time for Linux to gain USB support, then a long time to get WIFI (also because of the cheap vendors that used windows drivers to do the heavy lifting). Yeah, it was a very uphill struggle, with Microsoft actively pushing against Linux (remember the ‘Linux is a virus’ narrative?) I’m amazed we made it this far.

I understand that.

I upvote insightful, educational or newsworthy content and downvote clickbait. Especially YouTube clickbait.

Way back in the late XX century.

Oh look, Netscape Navigator is back.

They used to say that every product evolves until it can send mail. In that sense, this is now a mature product.

Of course nowadays no product is finished without built-in LLM functionality, so I’ll wait for that

Inertia is an immensely powerful force.

You can and should use whatever OS fits your use case. Right tool for the job and all that.

What you should not do is post a clickbait video to trigger the penguins into giving you views.

How often are you going to be managing ports?

Just use any tool you like, all they do is fiddle with the Kernel’s filter table.

We played Doom on MS DOS. It was hugely popular because it was a breakthrough for PC gaming. So nothing to do with Linux.

Yes, sorry, I always get them mixed up.

Use Audacity. You can even load all the old Winamp skins.

Hang on, that is a single player game? I now auto-discard AAA games up front because most of them are online multiplayer affairs with fancy in-game items to purchase and silly anti-cheat gimmicks that give Linux users a hard time.

I might look into buying this one, then.

My favorite way of reviving ancient 32 bit hardware is installing Haiku. It’s such a cool little OS, even if it can’t do all the tasks modern Linux can.

Xubuntu is still my distro of choice.

Removing snap and installing flatpak is two commands away.

This is the only game to have a permanent shortcut on my desktop.

I play it with some modern tweaks and mods. It’s a sure way to get my quick dose of gaming rush.

Once level up enough you’ll be writing a GRUB replacement yourself. Now that would be a massive achievement.

Achievement unlocked.

If you can fix it you unlock another one. If you manage to boot the system without using a rescue USB pen you unlock another one.

The damn thing Just Works™. That’s why the developers aren’t being pestered. It’s a pretty great piece of software.

Every couple of years I install other desktops to check out what the cool guys use nowadays, then go right back to XFCE.

It’s like having a hot cup of tea on a cold day while sitting in a comfy chair by the fire with your slippers on.

There are resources out there to learn exactly what’s going on, and the process is not too complex.

I’ve recovered a bunch of nuked MBR records and broken boot partitions myself, and maybe things UEFI added some complexity, but it’s not hard if you have a live USB ready and know the appropriate conjurations.

Most of the fun comes from self centered arrogant companies that make monocultural software, blatantly ignoring that other OSs may already be installed.