4w ago

Happy 34th Birthday!

A picture of bowls of eggs, flour, sugar, water, butter an sugar wit the text:

Happy 34th Birthday, Linux!

Here’s your cake, go ahead and compile it yourself.

Edit: fixed the text in the image to “34th”

35 comments

I compiled it as a flatpak for those who want :3.. it's unofficial tho
- A real flatpak cake would come wrapped in the oven used to bake it.
- That look delicious, tysm!
Mine came ready to eat.
- yum install -y mint-choc # 😋
10 days ago?
- It took 10 days to compile the post.
  
  And find it's way into the repositories
- I’ve had it at the 27th for a few years in my calendar now, but I have no idea why, lol.
  Apparently the official birthday should be August 25th, so maybe I mixed those up?
  
  I just found out GNU is 42 today! Maybe that explains it.
Compile it with Chef
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language#Chef
I'll throw some optional ingredients: Mint and cinnamon.
flatpak install flathub org.cake.chocolate
Man, Linux is one of those things where it's less old than I think.
I don't see myself as an early adopter at all, but I remember trying to get some version of Debian running on the same Pentium PC I had gotten to play stuff like Duke 3D, and I don't remember at the time thinking "oh, this is some new thing", so I had assumed the concept existed for decades, rather than being just a handful of years old.
- Right? I started futzing with different distros (all two/three of them, lol) in the mid to late 90s. Had zero clue how new all of this stuff actually was at the time. It felt like a super power to run something other than DOS/Win9{5,8}/NT4. No stupid software keys. Could easily run network services, etc.
  
  The thing is in my memory it wasn't that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs...
  I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn't think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.
  By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don't use but you've heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.
- UNIX used to be a thing for a long time before Linux came around. And altogether now: "Linux is just the kernel!"
  
  I guess that contributes to it. I guess when someone gave me install media (I believe for Debian, if you're gonna be pedantic about it) their approach may have been "there's now free Unix you can just get" and that's why it didn't feel new.
- Redhat was shipping production shit by then.
  Still they could not compete with Microsoft.
  At least not in the consumer market.
  
  Arguably they still can't.
  But yeah, I'm less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.
The cake is a lie!!!!
yay -Sy cake
- :: Repository AUR
  the-cake-is-a-lie
I never ever had to compile Linux, not even once. Always installed from the distributions website and was done.
- Doing a stage 1 gentoo, or LFS can be tedious but fun. When CPUs were a lot slower, getting the whole distro compiled under all of compiler optimizations that you could muster would actually make a difference in terms of performance.
  
  This is what I was told by some turkeys on the internet back in the day, so I dutifully attempted a from-scratch Gentoo compilation on my ancient old 1ghz Celeron laptop. I don't think it ever finished. Insofar as I'm aware it's still compiling to this very day.
  Later on I considered if the architecture of my commodity P3 based Celeron machine was materially any different from the oodles of others in the world, and I concluded that it wasn't. The hell with it.
Ah, yes. Every distro == Gentoo and LFS
At least give me a compilation script (recipe) :3
Ha ha. So funny... what's 'compile'?

35 comments