Switched to linux before it became mainstream

We are not. When I want a cubic desktop environment I reach(ed) for BeOS.

Oh, I hadn't thought of Tux Racer in ages. I think I need to play that again.

Tux racer go b.....r......r........r

I only had access to ex-corporate office hand-me-down motherboards as a kid. This was about 1 potato per 3 seconds of rendering performance (I'm 34)

I've been trying to remember but it hasn't come back to me. It was a 2D, top down, space battle game. Its possible it wasn't named after Star Trek, but you pilot a grey ship with a saucer section and nacelles to fire torpedoes and phasers at green bird of prey looking ships so...

That all sounds very familiar. The one I played was full color but it must have either been a late version of Empire or something heavily "inspired" by it.

There's always TempleOS

Drew DeVault just did a Unix clone as a break from “real work”

That's why I plan to move my servers into an L4 clone.

Heard me out

FreeDOS

I dual booted it as a desktop for about 6 months around the same time, but honestly all I did is use it as a desktop and browser. I could hardly figure out how to do anything else. I've forgotten everything about the experience, and anything I happen to accidentally remember I try to also forget.

shutters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Women_Have_Better_Sex_Under_Socialism

I recently tried switching from Arch to NixOS and the experience I had can best be described as apalling. I have not had a new user experience this bad since my first dip into Ubuntu dependency hell back in 2016. I'd like to preface this by saying I've been a Linux user in one form or another for almost half my life at this point, and in that time this may well be the most I've struggled to get things to work.

Apparently they have this thing called home-manager which looks pretty cool. I'd like to give that a shot. Apparently I have to enable a new Nix channel before I can install it. I'm guessing that's the equivalent of a PPA? Well, alright. nix-channel --add ..., nix-channel --update (oh, so it waits until now to tell me I typo'd the URL. Alright), and now to run the installation command and... couldn't find home-manager? Huh?? I just installed it. I google the error message and apparently you have to reboot after adding a new nix-channel and doing nix-channel --update before it will actually take effect, and the home-manager guide didn't tell me that. Ah well, at least it works now.

I didn't want to wait for KDE and its 6 morbillion dependencies to download, so I opted for Weston. It wasn't a thing in configuration.nix (programs.weston.enable=true; threw an error and there was no page for it on the NixOS wiki), but it was available in nix-env (side note: why does nix-env -i take upwards of 30 seconds just to locate a package?), so I installed it, tried to run it, and promptly got an inscrutable "Permission denied" error with one Google result that had gone unresolved. Oh well, that's alright, I guess that's not supported just yet -- I'll install Sway instead. Great, now I have a GUI and all I need is a browser. nix-env -i firefox gave me the firefox-beta binary which displayed the crash reporter before even opening a browser window. Okay, note to self: always use configuration.nix. One programs.firefox.enable=true; and one nixos-rebuild switch later, I'm off to the races. Browser is up and running. Success! Now I'd like to install a Rust development environment so I can get back to work. According to NixOS wiki, I can copy paste this incantation into a shell.nix file and have rustup in there. Cool. After resolving a few minor hangups regarding compiler version, manually telling rustc where the linker is, and telling nix-shell that I also need cmake (which was thankfully pretty easy), I'm met with a "missing pkg-config file for openssl" error that I have absolutely no idea how to begin to resolve.

I'm trying to stick with it, I really am -- I love the idea that I can just copy my entire configuration to a brand new install by copying one file and the contents of my home directory and have it be effectively the same machine -- but I'm really struggling here. Surely people wouldn't rave about NixOS as much as they do if it was really this bad? What am I doing wrong?

Also unrelated but am I correct in assuming that I cannot install KDE without also installing the X server?

I use ubuntu by the way 🤓

Nix just had internal politics. Reject Nix; embrace Guix!

"I use FOSS btw"

nixos is the greatest .config file

Also, Arch is sort of bullshit. For everyone that insists the Arch wiki is the pinnacle of truth, I followed it to the letter and couldn't get some stuff working. To be fair this was maybe 8 or 9 years ago, but the wiki wasn't as magical as people acted like. So like... Why bother? Oh boy, I'm gonna save a bit of space because I'm not installing a desktop environment? Who cares! It's such over kill for the average user and you're not really getting much in return. It's sort of like buying a project car to work on. It should be viewed more as a hobby for folks super interested in creating the perfect setup for themselves.

So, this meme is a sith?

I honestly hate this meme template. It’s barely ever used for anything smart and mostly just being a gatekeeper.

The guy saying he uses Linux because of some ‘90s game is way better.

Wtf is her problem with the cube?

That was before Gentoo

Not really any different than 10

Is it so bad? You can turn off junk like every other Windows. As for the anticompetitive behavior Microsoft has been doing that since DOS

I didn't even backup. I just went for it

I thought it was! Didn't even second guess it.

Now get off my lawn, damn kids!

This is why I didn't switch until this year. Valve really did a great thing by driving this adoption and I feel like with Proton in the state it's in, there's really not much you're giving up by going to Linux these days.

The list of actual pain points is ever shrinking now. I can't imagine switching back in 95. You had to put up with so much inequity for a lot of that time.

Back around 95/96 I once untarred a etc directory from a Slackware install over a redhat etc directory. It booted and worked perfectly. It was really hard to update though. Redhat started out as Slackware.

I keep one machine with slackware installed. I use it for various purposes include light desktop use. I occasionally compile a kernel. Just to keep the skill. My daily drivers are Debian and Ubuntu machines though. These pretentious new users(arch, cough, cough) probably wish they had the patience to keep a Slackware installation going full time.

This is a spicy retelling of the lore. I hope it catches on.

New copypasta just dropped

That was great, up until the part about GNU. GNU hasn’t had anything to do with BSD for over a decade. Maybe use POSIX instead. 😊

Yep, I know. I have to log into Windows to manage the files on my Huawei tablet.

That's okay. I can do 99% of what I want on Linux without Microsoft snooping on me.

Yeah, about half of my library already runs on Linux.

The problem I have now is that, soon, I'm gonna want to do a reinstall so Linux can have more disk space. :) My PC's pretty fast, so the reboot doesn't really bug me all that much.

if we are counting servers linux was never not mainstream

Linux predated Unix in my book

what do you mean?

Docker on macos runs in a virtual machine, for some people that might not be desirable.

Microsoft has always been good at catering to businesses and hooking them on windows+office+etc.

But there has always been better alternatives around, OS/2 was so much better than windows 3.x, and WordPerfect was better than word. I'm sure there are countless other examples.