this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Hard
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
I started programming in DOS professionally in January 1991. It was pretty clear how bad Microsoft sucked by February of 1991, and blindingly obvious when they "updated" DOS more than annually with "95% backward compatibility" which translated to: "we just broke all your programs and you're only going to have to figure out which 5% of your code you're going to have to update to make it work in this version - aaaaand, by the time you do that we will be releasing a newer version! ;-P "
Something called DrDOS came along and we used it just because it wasn't updating and breaking backward compatibility so often. Since 640k wasn't enough for us even then, we ended up putting the kludge "Phar-Lap 32 bit extender" libraries on our product so we could access all the cheap RAM that systems were being shipped with (2MB was pretty much standard by 1992).
Then there was the day that McAffee decided that our product's main .exe was a virus. It wasn't. It wasn't infected with anything. It didn't do anything vaguely resembling malware. McAffee just had a false positive pattern match with our software.
The Microsoft treadmill was a very real thing all through the 1990s - much like Android and iOS are today. Sure, you've got a cool idea for an app, but we're going to keep shifting the OS underneath you so that you're spending 90%+ of your time just recoding your same old app for the latest OS release. That way you don't have any time to innovate and maybe threaten our business model.
Yeah, I jumped ship right around the time Win8 came out. 14.04 was an interesting time to start learning. I was obsessed with trimming out bloat, so I used a tool to uninstall orphaned packages. Problem was, it also deleted some dependencies for GNOME.
I had, to quote the most helpful and humorous person in an Ubuntu forum post, "borked it so bad it had to be nuked from orbit."
I have since learned my lesson and learned to be a little bit more careful with the magical responsibilities of sudo.
I have turned to scripting all of my desktop mods and keeping them in a git repo. So, when I nuke a system from orbit all I have to do is install fresh, add git, check out my repo and run the scripts.
Bruh you were late. Vista sucked, 7 sucked, they were shit since XP. Sure, I kept using it until 10 because I was afraid linux still didn't work, but XP was the last time I was happy with computers until I installed Fedora.
Nah, 7 was pretty good, although it was the last good one.
Anything past that was garbage but frankly I tolerated it as as a teenager I was too busy being horny all the time to notice how my computer was increasingly antagonistic towards me.
I tolerated all the way to windows 10 but windows 11 was the last nail in the coffin for me. I probably am indeed late to the party but tbh Linux didn't inspire me until recently when I saw its became way more user-friendly than it was in 2015 when I first tried it.