[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 45 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh. So the problem is the people who have been in the workforce all of two fucking years and who are likely so low ranking that they are nowhere in any position to make a difference even with their own work schedule.

Not the people who have been in charge for decades, dragging their feet, misleading, buying/funding shit candidates, gaming the market, and who still openly deny climate change.

Fuck outta here.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago

There was a KDE theme recently that was deleting home folders

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Give personhood rights to nature

Not corporations.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 weeks ago

The last computer I built for my dad before he passed ran Xubuntu LTS exclusively for about half a decade. No problems. He did updates himself.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 5 points 3 weeks ago

Mess with the best, Die like the rest.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 12 points 3 weeks ago

Debian.

If you want to try something different, maybe LMDE.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 37 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 9 points 4 weeks ago

Exactly. Getting rid of the lawn altogether is the first step. Plant more trees, grow a garden, plant native plants for pollinators.

Having a big yard full of grass that you need an ICE powered by fossil fuels to maintain is soulless insanity.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 months ago

Thanks, I see it now; it was user error as I had not enabled JavaScript for that site.

Thanks for sharing. So the US is not competitive on price and scale when it comes to EVs and solar panels, and therefore the powers that be argue that we need to actively harm US consumers through protectionist measures in order to protect business. How is that even remotely responsible?

Also, the article is critical of Chinese factories for mass producing solar panels in large quantities all the time instead of laying off employees when demand is low. I mean, this helps deliver a solution to a problem that the US fails to acknowledge. If only the US had that kind of ambition....

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 months ago

I don't have access to read the full article, but how is this a bad thing?

It seems, from the first couple of paragraphs I read, that China is flooding the market with lower cost products that are better for the environment than status quo.

Why does it matter where the come from? Is this not a net positive? Is the USA so afraid of China that they would rather have everyone spending more money, and using traditional ICE vehicles?

Again, I don't have the full article but I don't see this as a worry.

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SeikoAlpinist

joined 5 months ago