SeikoAlpinist

It was kind of an upstart thing and people were trying to find ways to monetize it.

My first Linux was Red Hat on a 486 in 1998 and it was different than I was used to. I was a kid who didn't know how to startx so I just emailed a developer using pine and they helped me figure out and choose a window manager. Nobody even got mad at this barely teenager just emailing dumb questions. I got lost with fvwm95 and afterstep. I tried every window manager, mlvwm, qvwm, IceWM, etc but ended up liking blackbox the most. I had 12MB of RAM on my first Linux system, 1MB of vram and 256 colors. We were all sarcastic in a cringe, adolescent way but everyone was friendly and helpful.

There was this fascination with monkeys in pop culture, but not real monkeys--chimps and gorillas. People would throw monkey in their username or in some random nu-metal song for some reason. There were monkeys you could download for your desktop. There was this thing by PC gamer called coconut monkey. I don't know what that's all about. And anyway I associate this period with the foot logo of Gnome, which was unprofessional but that was the point. Also, gimp was a funny name for an app, and pan stood fo pimp ass news.

I discovered Slashdot and Freshmeat and Sourceforge and kuro5hin. Usenet groups were great back then. So was irc. I trolled Slashdot and got negative karma and for the next 15 years before we all moved to SoylentNews, my comments started at -1.

Nobody knew how to pronounce Linux. Some people said Line-X because his name was Linus like on Charlie Brown, and some people said Leenucks.

At some point it became a corporate thing and the term Linux was everywhere. Randomly on magazine covers. There was also this divide, almost marketing driven, it seemed that people who liked warez and whatever started to love Microsoft and shit on Linux. So gamers especially started to shit talk and that's the first time that being a computer nerd wasn't like this unifying concept, there was an us versus them divide. People who could compile code they wrote and who were genuinely curious versus people who just wanted to download a bunch of shit and show you how big their start menu was and play games. I think this divide still exists.

There was a bunch of commercial software for Linux too. Metro-X, Accelerated X, Motif, Applixware, Star Office. Descent 3. One of the Quakes. Motif, the toolkit, looked amazing. I thought CDE with themes was the coolest looking thing ever. But I couldn't afford CDE so I used XFce which was an XForms knockoff. And then enlightenment came along and pushed the boundaries of what we thought a desktop would be. Also, I was able to drag console windows with transparency on that 486 on e16.

Debian kind of had an elitist community and talked down to people so I never used it. I liked Slackware the most and spent a weekend downloading the floppies over a dialup connection. That led to me discovering FreeBSD in 1999, which I stuck with for almost a decade.

Later, a comp sci student, I didn't see Linux at university in the labs. It was Solaris and macOS in the mid 2000s. Eventually, the Solaris computers were shut down and replaced with more Macs.

My girlfriend's Windows ME computer was so full of spyware so I installed SuSE with KDE on it for her in her dorm. And she was able to do her papers in AbiWord. And 20+ years later we are married and it all worked out.

I finally switched to Debian stable about 4 years ago and have no complaints. It's a lot easier now.

Edit: A couple more things: I started using Linux because I was very poor and it was free and Windows 95 was a mess on my system. I mean dirt roads and no water for long periods of time. My 486 in 1998 was sort of old already and it came with 8mb of RAM as a hand me down in 1995, but I was dumpster diving outside a community college when I was 12 and found an IBM PS/2 and stole the 30 pin SIMMs out of it. And one of them worked in my 486 computer so I ended up with 12mb of RAM. I overclocked it to 100mhz. That 486 got me through high school and into college where I ended up with an AMD system with a pirated Thai RM233 Windows 2000. But I went back to FreeBSD because I needed a compiler. So that kind of knowledge was useful and now that I have a good career from what I learned, I have donated a lot of money over the years to different projects. Also I make sure my kids have only ever known Linux and Gnome and it works fine for them.

It's funny that we buy these metal and glass phones and then protect them with rubber and plastic cases.

New phones are made to show wear so that they lose resale value.

People used their real names, and even posted where they were from on Usenet. There was a sense of community and there was a term -- netequitte -- that described how we would act towards one another. If you used a handle, watch out, you might be a troll, and you certainly weren't going to be immediately trusted and had to build your reputation.

Replies went below the body, not above it, and everybody hated Microsoft Outlook for unilaterally deciding that replies go at the top of a message. Similarly, people hated WebTV users for just bringing the level of discourse to the gutter.

Web forums were fast and also a good place for community, kind of a gateway from Usenet to modern discussion forums. When people passed away we would all attend the funerals or whatever if we were close. There were 56k warnings in the subject line if a post had embedded images.

In the metal scene, maybe other places too, you would trade CDs. So like you had a burner and someone else had a burner and you would swap copies of CDs that you had for something they had. So you could build an entire huge collection of CDs and demo tapes cheaply. There were trading lists and people had reputations and who was reliable, who was a rip-off, and who was an idiot for burning 256kbps MP3s and selling them as CD quality (yes, you could tell a difference back then; something we still haven't recovered from now that everyone is streaming). If you didn't have anything to trade, you would pay like $8 for a CD. Black Friday 2000 was huge because burners only cost a couple hundred dollars that week, so it was a wise investment.

Sometimes the traders of new music were the band members themselves, and that was always fun to find out. I got Sons of Northern Darkness from a guy who was in the studio. I got a copy of another highly respected album from the bassist of that band who just wanted people to hear it. They would just mail it your house and you would receive a CD in an envelope with chicken scratch handwriting on it.

When Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia was leaked in the trading community, it blew people's minds. People were like holy shit this meme band that everyone hates just got serious and took our entire genre to the next level. I cannot understate how big that album was.

People sent checks via the mail in exchange for goods. Online transactions were still done this way instead of all electronically. So you would purchase online, get an order number, put that order number on a certified check, and mail it off. And a week later you had your stuff.

Also everybody had a customized desktop. Not just the wallpaper, but the themes, the colors. There might be a talking cat that sat on the desktop and would get up and walk around and poop and tell you what time it was. Everybody had unique desktops. Everybody had different fonts. Maybe cursive, and in pink and yellow and that was what the entire interface looked like.

Slashdot was huge and the original Reddit. There was a Slashdot effect where if they linked a site, that site would suddenly get so much traffic that it might die. Also in those days you could tell if a webpage was using IIS or Apache because the Windows server was always slower to serve webpages. When Dell entered the server space people laughed because Dell was not an enterprise brand and who would ever seriously use x86 or Windows on a production server?

Online chat was a thing with a/s/l and everyone had an online significant other with whom they would chat about things daily, but who lived like 5 states away and no you would never, ever go meet them. Even suggesting such an idea would usually end the friendship. Everybody had an online diary with a guestbook and a stat counter -- showing how many page hits you had.

There was less corporate ownership and more independence back then. It was okay to be different and unique. The Internet wasn't just like 5 websites.

I think the Fediverse -- Mastodon especially, comes closest to recreating that turn of the century feel.

No feelings either way, I started using X since the last millennium and have been on Wayland without problems (Gnome or sway, never anything more than integrated graphics card) for about four years now.

But I really wish there was an fvwm for Wayland. And Window Maker.

Deadpool

Swastikas painted on our house when I was a kid.

Kids yell in the public park tell me that I have to go back. When pushing my son in a stroller.

Getting told that I will have to pay for stuff when I pick it up at the store at Dollywood, like I don't know how a merchant economy works.

Had to fight a lot in the feral public school system growing up. All the ching chong jokes.

Being referred to as "chowie" by a prominent basketball scout while in high school.

Being asked if I eat dogs by my boss. In 2023.

Being asked if my mom was an Asian whore by another boss. In 2018.

Being told that I'm not Asian and that some white girl looks more Asian than me and how can I even claim to be Asian when I don't have squinty eyes?

Jokes about my ancestry when they can't place me.

Being pulled into secondary every time I travel through Paris CDG because I always get flagged. And one Securitas security officer telling me that Americans will never accept me as American when I finished.

Dating scene as a teen, everything going well, then meeting the parents, then being told I wasn't allowed to date their white daughter anymore. Like clockwork. Which is fine, they can't handle the spice in my food anyway.

Probably still Firefox. The web is shit.

Gutenberg was a grifter. He stole money from people, sometime his own family, and ran up debts that he couldn't pay.

The only reason that he started printing bibles and became religious was because he was going to be thrown in prison for swindling people out of money, and it's a bad look to throw someone in prison who prints the word of God. In fact, most of what we know about Gutenberg comes from his court documents.

Also movable type and the printing press were already known in Europe and had already been invented in East Asia several hundred years earlier than Gutenberg. (the first printed texts date back to 700 CE and movable type prints around 1000 CE, both in modern China). It was nothing new.

Debian.

If you want to try something different, maybe LMDE.

Since mangoes are in season now:

Green mangoes (still crunchy) with crushed Thai pepper and sugar and a tiny pinch of salt.

Or just go all out and make the crack sauce.

We're still new to the game, and we have no idea what we're looking for.

Koyaanisqatsi

Mess with the best, Die like the rest.

There was a KDE theme recently that was deleting home folders

Domino's in the USA has / had? a Wisconsin five cheese pizza that is amazing.

Pan crust with Alfredo sauce and spinach is peak and redefines pizza.

I like the design and wish manufacturers in general were a little more flashy with their phones. This photo is reminiscent of the last days of Nokia.

But if this is anything like the days of HMD Nokia partnership/branding, it is pure trash. I owned the X20, XR20, and T10 tablets since new and none of them work anymore, and the XR20 never got the updates it was promised.

North Carolina is gerrymandered to hell.

Endeavour sway edition was great at this.

I get mistaken for Hispanic and told I look Colombian. My American name is pretty common white guy name but people call me by the Spanish variant.

But that's not even the right continent and I have zero Hispanic heritage. All it tells me is that you look at skin color and not features, and you lump me into an "other" category. We don't all look like KPop idols.

This is complicated by the fact that my South American wife is light skinned with green eyes, and when she speaks fluent Spanish people assume she is an American girl who learned the language due to me, her "Hispanic" husband.

Not a bad thing, just annoying, and please stop yelling that I "have to go back" when I'm in the park with my kids.

There's a new accessibility framework being started by a Gnome developer very recently.

Which means, best case scenario where it's perfect and other desktops buy in, it will roll out to traditional desktop users in half a decade at the earliest.

There were/are some really good Asian and Asian-American communities on Reddit that didn't follow typical discourse. IYKYK.

Some of those groups are replicated on Lemmy, but are completely empty of content.

Until recently, TikTok was filling that role for me, but it seems it is starting to get more "appropriate" for American audiences as I think they are finally playing the game. Lots of "Jesus" and "white guy with microphone" popping up on my feed there now. The same thing happened to Youtube about 15 years ago so there's nothing new under the sun.

I used to prefer ThinkPads but I've moved on. I have had lots of reliability problems with them over the past few years. I had keys fall off a newer ThinkPad keyboard (which wasn't user replaceable) and another new ThinkPad just die under warranty and the repair person damaged it further when trying to fix it.

I am on System76 now and have no issues and they do good things like right to repair and Coreboot.

If I had to choose a single laptop for everything, it would be the Toughbook 40. I have one for work and it has a 1200 nit display. It runs Ubuntu LTS perfectly. It costs several thousand dollars new but has swapable components, multiple batteries, and part availability is measured in decades. You can get an older CF-31 or CF-54 for a few hundred dollars and still find new components for it.

• MS-DOS 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11
• Red Hat Linux 5.2
• Slackware Linux 3.5
• FreeBSD 3.2 -> FreeBSD 6.0
• Kubuntu 6.06
• Linux Mint Darnya
• Arch Linux with KDEmod and oss4, later with awesome window manager
• Fedora Leonidas, Constantine
• Microsoft Windows 7
• Fedora Goddard, Lovelock (this time with KDE)
• OpenBSD 4.9 -> OpenBSD 7.0
• Debian stable (buster, then bullseye, now bookworm)

I left OpenBSD reluctantly when I found that it wasn't meeting my needs anymore. I needed an iPad Pro and an iPhone to fill in the missing functionality and they don't play nice with OpenBSD for things like transferring files, photos, etc.

I've since converted the family to Debian stable. Backports and flatpak make it incredibly reliable. We can do everything from here and its well documented for every use case. Video chats, zoom conference calls, file sync/sharing, bluetooth music through Spotify, etc. Started with buster when it was the stable distro; jumped early to bullseye during the freeze; and now holding onto bookworm.

• ZenWalk was unique and great about 15 years ago as an easy Slackware with minimalist install.
• Chakra Linux was an Arch+KDEmod distro that kind of went away.
• Bodhi Linux has its own desktop called Moksha.
• There is a GNUstep Live CD that comes out every few years, based on Debian. It is a unique setup from a time when the future of computing was promising. I think it is distributed on LinuxQuestions or some other forum.
• There was a distro called gOS about 15 years ago that used a lot of desktop widgets and Google apps. Their business model was basically, "We are going to re-skin Ubuntu and call it gOS and hope Google buys us." It did not work out.
• Darwin was upstream for macOS and for many years, there was a community of users who would port the traditional *NIX stack to it. Xorg, traditional window managers, a ports system, etc.
• Frugalware Linux was well polished and kind of a spiritual successor to Zenwalk.
• openSUSE 10.3 had the most beautiful Gnome setup. It was unique in that it had a single panel, a modified Clearlooks theme, and a Vista-style start menu.
• OpenSolaris likewise had a very unique and beautiful look, with its macOS-inspired Nimbus theme. I think this was the best looking theme of that era.
• SimplyMEPIS was my first Linux on a T61. I had used FreeBSD for the decade prior. I don't know what was better about SimplyMEPIS than Debian, nor do I know what SimplyMEPIS meant versus regular MEPIS. It's kind of like Claws Mail and Sylpheed Claws. Some times we just throw words together and give it an icon and there it is.

I used all of these at some point.

I'm challenging myself to use it as my only laptop browser for a month. It's not bad but it seems slow compared to Firefox.

I last used Epiphany probably 20 years ago. Galeon for a bit before that. The situation back then was reversed; those browsers were much faster than the full Mozilla Suite with which they shared a rendering engine.

I like the smells of tiger balm, kimchi, and fish sauce.

I think this is an outlier because I've been asked to never bring that stuff in the office anymore.