Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.

Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I'd be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don't really remember too many people using AIM.

Best controllers ever, in my opinion.

Just Thunderbird is fine for me, has all the features I want and I already get my email there (but even if I didn't I'd struggle to find an RSS reader with its features).

Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, we don't see them even on communities on other instances. I find it makes it a much more pleasant experience.

OpenSUSE, it's what I'd be using if Fedora didn't exist.

It was Red Hat Linux 8.0 (not to be confused with RHEL 8), I think, that I first dabbled in Linux, that was around early 2003, and then I moved on to Fedora Core 1. But I went exclusively-Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) in 2006.

I've moved around since then but for the last 5 years I've ended up back on Fedora, where I've been since version 28, now version 39.

"Square one" sounds good to me!

4.20 still feels like yesterday

It just adds another layer of abstraction when my file manager works just fine. I think it started back in the iPod days, and now you have a generation of people who don't know how to manage files.

I think you're right then, and honestly I can't say I've noticed.

VLC because it works with everything and it doesn't try to organise my music collection for me.