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Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)
  • 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.

  • Paul George, 76ers Agree to 4-Year, $212M Contract After Clippers Exit
  • End of an era. This probably makes the 76ers contenders.

    Wish the Clippers could have worked something out. Their other two stars decided to take pay cuts so PG would return.

  • Oh Joe...
  • He had nothing to gain from agreeing to this debate.

  • Seriously, where do I go?
  • North Carolina is gerrymandered to hell.

  • 40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess
  • 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.

  • Thoughts on the Epiphany Browser? (not Chrome botnet crap, or even FF-based, GTK+ WebKit-based) (+ A good framework for web automation?)
  • 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.

  • NBA Rumors: Lakers, JJ Redick Agree to 4-Year HC Contract Amid LeBron James Buzz
  • And yet they only offered a couple million more per year for Hurley, pretty much the biggest name in coaching right now.

    Shit show.

    If LAK was serious, Hurley would have gotten a 9 figure contract.

  • NBA Rumors: Lakers, JJ Redick Agree to 4-Year HC Contract Amid LeBron James Buzz
  • If he's an analytics guy, and surrounds himself with the right people, this is an immediate improvement.

  • Morning walk
  • Very nice. Amazing watches, that's the year I got my first Seiko.

  • Gen Z are desperate to be eco-friendly but LinkedIn says they’re so underskilled they actually pose a ‘risk’ to climate progress
  • 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.

  • “Systemd is the future”
  • There was a KDE theme recently that was deleting home folders

  • And that's why I love linux, to keep using old hardware
  • Nothing as nice as

    Gnome on a retina

    10 year old MacBook.

  • THE BOSTON CELTICS ARE THE 2024 NBA CHAMPIONS
  • I did not want Boston to win, but that was impressive. This is the most dominant I've seen a team from start to finish in several years.

  • THE DALLAS MAVERICKS HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED FROM CHAMPIONSHIP CONTENTION
  • Kyrie isn't going to be Kyrie for much longer. Yeah, you have to run it back, but I think that between Denver, OKC, and Minnesota, this was Dallas' best chance.

  • Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure
  • Great catch. It seems that since the last time I've turned off email subscriptions, they've added three more at the bottom: Drive, Pass, and VPN to individually deselect. So it's opt-in until I manually opt out. Additionally, this is inaccessible from the mobile or desktop app and I'm not sure it will turn off the top right advertising banner that shows up sometimes.

  • Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure
  • Will this make them stop spamming me for likes and referrals even though I'm a paying customer? Maybe they can even offer me that 6TB storage tier that I've been willing to pay for but only happens to people who spread the gospel and bring in referrals.

    The tone around this company is too preachy and evangelical compared to other paid services.

  • SeikoAlpinist SeikoAlpinist @slrpnk.net

    fuck the media. fuck the markets.

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