palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurg

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You're missing the fact that water wets itself, and is thus wet. The only non-wet water is that where the molecules are far enough apart to not interact with each other. That's very hard to achieve even in the vapour phase.

Yes, yes, I see you laughing. "It needs new underwear" ha ha ha. But seriously, though.

So, first of all, I'm not sure everyone here knows who Dave Plummer is nor that he's fairly open about his being autistic.

(For those that don't know, he's the guy mostly responsible for the classic Windows Task Manager and a whole bunch of other things that appeared in Windows back in the day. His YouTube videos are an interesting watch every now and again.)

Second, folks are going to find this to be in bad taste whether they know he's autistic or not.

The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD

In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.

I think it's almost certain that Linux's niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.

Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.

Ouch. AMD and Intel are both US based. Intel was easy enough, but I'd have to do a lot of soul searching and research to give up AMD, their graphics cards and the x86 architecture.

And this is from someone in Britain, where ARM - probably the next best alternative - is based. (As in located, not the new sense of based. Though they might actually be that too.)

I have a set of commands I run occasionally to back up my homedir. That contains pretty much anything that's text, text-like and related metadata. Things like personal documents, code projects, etc. are all in there. Basically anything that isn't enormous goes into that.

i.e. Software installed into my homedir by things like Steam and Wine are currently skipped. It currently runs to about 1GB, compressed.

Minecraft worlds are also skipped but get their own separate backup command set.

Never really got around to compiling those command sets into actual scripts. I kind of prefer to copy-paste them out of a text document and into the terminal so I can take action at each step if something goes wrong.

The major failing is that they each build a single tar.xz, which I then copy to an external 1TB drive. There's no deduplication so that's getting a bit full at this point.

Photos and media hoards (software installers, website rips, music) currently go on a single Storage drive that isn't backed up. I should probably do something about the photos, tbh.

Warm freshly baked white bread is 10/10 for a bread lover.

Supermarket own-brand plain white sliced loaf is generally ordinary, basic and inexpensive, but nonetheless acceptable. 5/10.

This knowledge may raise more questions than answers, but it may help narrow the scope.

Scale may extend past 10 for sufficiently exotic bread. Ask the continental Europeans offended by that 10/10 rating.

Tiny Core Linux seems to be 32-bit by default (inferred from their downloads page which links to a separate 64-bit version)

Their minimum package is GUI-less.

Haven't used it myself, but maybe it's what you're looking for. Spin it up in a VM, etc.

This site lists that and four others: https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distros-without-gui/ (I only looked at Tiny Core for the sake of this comment, so I don't know if the others are 32-bit or not.)

Crazy alternative: FreeDOS. Pros: Lots of abandonware out there for that platform. Cons: I can't tell how good its support is for USB-connected drives and networking. It definitely has some. Maybe it would be enough for your hardware.

I am old. I am still not over JavaScript existing outside of a browser. I'm not sure I ever will be. And that's from someone who uses a Linux DE that uses JavaScript and XML as part of its GUI.

Files, hardware / peripherals and programs. The distinction can get a bit blurry what with drivers and the fact that Linux exposes most of the hardware via the filesystem.

OK, WTAF on those word replacements. I'd be freaking out about malware.

Did you miss the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing? Disney cancelled him so people started cancelling their Disney subscriptions. Suddenly they reconsidered.

Boycotts don't always work, sure, but sometimes they do and that's enough to prove that they're worth trying in the first place.

Obligatory mention that Linux Mint's dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user's window manager's look and feel rather than GNOME's enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they're necessary.

They've not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I'm not even sure they intend to, but it's a noble effort.

Yes, it really is called that. Like I've said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.

Top right quadrant is full of forgetful carpenters.

I saw the 20 second version of that video around that time. I thought it was a fake at first and then the next time it replayed it became clear that this was no fake. The person who showed me it was showing it to share the burden of having seen such a thing.

No desire to see it again. And after that I saw all sorts of things like rottencom, goatse, the BME Pain Olympics and all sorts of other gross stuff on the early WWW. Some of that came pretty close but nothing has topped it.

I kind of want that to mean we can now insult and impugn the Taliban on the internet without fear of retribution but 1) that'd be cruel even if they are wilfully backward, 2) it would undoubtedly devolve into racism and Islamophobia from the less bright among us, and 3) you can bet the top brass of the Taliban won't have given it up.

I bet at least one of them is a closet Swiftie.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you. Dropping the J was probably a good idea considering the people who would have to read it on a regular basis, and how J sounds in English.

As I recall, that is remarkably close to the true story. They wanted something that could make web pages dynamic, wouldn't crash the browser or any pages that used it and they wanted it in the Netscape browser ASAP.

One man thus threw something together that looked a little bit Java-like and it ended up in the browser fairly shortly thereafter.

Hard to believe that was 30 years ago.

Then you should have sex with as many rich people as possible then die as quickly and quietly as possible, there's a good chap.

Best regards, Your corporate overlords

Are you one of those pro-Zionism cranks or am I missing a trick here?

So I went down the rabbit hole of the etymology of "Gentoo" and you might say that "too" and "two" are more closely related as words and meanings than either is to the "-too" of "Gentoo".

The latter is a corruption / evolution of Latin -tivus of which the -tiv- part still exists in modern Latin-derived English words, like "adjective", "active" and, perhaps importantly here, "genitive".

Start with the Latin root: genitivus; push it through early (gen(i)tiū) then colonial Portuguese: gentio; and then confuse the meaning with "ill-born" or "gentile" in colonial British-Indian English to get "Gentoo". The word was used there to describe the non-Hindu inhabitants of India. Because of course it was.

So, apparently, Gentoo penguins are called that because they're somehow reminiscent of 19th century Indian Muslims. Oof.

Pausing for a second to let that one pass...

And now...

English "too" evolved from "to" into its own niche (compare how "than" came from "then"). The second-ness / two-ness of "too" is an accident more than anything, even though the pronunciations have converged.

Do not ask about Ubunthree.