SeikoAlpinist

Current distributions, I like EndeavourOS sway edition and Window Maker Live (wmlive).

Historically, I liked HP-UX and OpenSolaris with Gnome and the Nimbus theme. Linux Mint Darnya was nice. So was OpenSUSE 9.3 I think with Gnome and its custom launcher. Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Scientific Linux 6 was nice looking. We went a couple of years without CentOS so everyone used SL6.

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 (its cringe today), and PAN stood for 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.

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.

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.

This gives Kryten vibes.

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.

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.

There was a KDE theme recently that was deleting home folders

Only one peer, can you guys seed?

Give personhood rights to nature

Not corporations.

• 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 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.