This has been the story of Linux since the 1990s.

BSD does the same thing. They famously stuck at the gcc 4.2 series about a decade too long because of licenses.

Nothing new under the sun.

I don’t disagree. It comes fast. Take care of yourself my friend.

We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

I stopped distro hopping and started hopping around Mastodon instances instead.

I currently have two active accounts. One is more established but the server goes down for days at a time.

The other is pretty robust but I’m still establishing myself there.

I echo the sentiment that there aren’t a lot of Asian people on Mastodon. Although it seems that vivaldi.net is mostly Japanese people.

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don’t remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That’s it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

Just use Debian.

That thread is just the result of a search today to see if the situation has changed.

When I tried it, we were still trying to figure out how the two displays worked. It looks like that link has a solution. It would have been great to try back then, but I wouldn’t go out and buy a 5k iMac or LG monitor just to try it out now.

I never got it to work at anything over 4k several years ago.

I went down the rabbit hole and ended up just selling. Apple only ever released the driver for macOS and for Windows 10 with Bootcamp.

Apparently it will work in X11 with a few setup changes per this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=6477626#post6477626

About 25 years ago, I used something called mlvwm which was designed to look like System 7.

I ran this on a 486 and later on a Duron system with something called “bochs” that let me run a full System 7 in a container.

A quick search shows that it is still around and has been forked by a couple of people.

X1 Nano:

• narrower than the old 11.6 laptops and slightly taller.
• Higher than 1080 screen due to the taller ratio.
• IPS display
• 0.97kg without charger.
• Thinkpad keyboard and track point.
• strong Linux support

Here is the PSREF for the first generation. They are up to Gen 3 of this line now.

Agree; Gnome on Fedora is just more polished in general than Gnome anywhere else. So sasy to add another language and that input language works everywhere including Flatpak apps Qt apps, etc. Fedora is winning me over in this regard and I’ve kind of been a Red Hat hater these days.

After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal “immutable” distro install last week.

My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo “student-rugged” class laptop. Everything works and he hasn’t had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.

The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.

I love the old Mac Pros and even built a trashcan setup for Debian a few years ago. But TBH, they use a lot of electricity for the processing power they provide. If you already have one or can get one for free, great, use it. Linux runs great. But I wouldn’t go to OWC and buy something that would be outperformed by a fanless, low TDP machine these days.

Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.

At the bottom in the

Education, Professional Development, & Credentials

section

Something like: Open Source Computer Science Coursework Completed XX hours of coursework through ABCD, EFGH, HIJK Universities Relevant Coursework: Linear Algebra (Princeton); Machine Learning (Stanford); Cryptography (Stanford)

It would weigh less than my traditional degrees, but if pressed on it (unlikely), I would describe exactly what this is: an effort to liberate CS education in the spirit of the Free Software movement, using synchronous and asynchronous learning methodology in an online learning platform from accredited, reputable universities.

At this point in my career, it would show continued aptitude for growth and professional development, since it’s been close to two decades since my first degree.

Also, at this point, I’ve seen people put removed like Strayer U and ITT Tech and Liberty on their resume and get hired for very high paying jobs. Honestly I would take this over that trash.

Even 15 years ago, most lower level undergrad coursework was 150+ students in a lecture hall where the professor would pull up Blackboard and just load the slideshow. It was only at the 300+ level where class size shrunk down and interpersonal relationships sort of mattered.

My wife’s graduate degree a few years later but still over a decade ago was almost entirely online; they only met in person to discuss their progress towards the capstone. And she has a nice prestigious degree with a very expensive university name on it, walked across the stage at that University, and nowhere does that diploma read, “Online.”

I have a lot of beef with the US university system. Change has to start somewhere.

How did I miss this five years ago? What an excellent idea. I think we should be able to just finish the coursework and then put it on our resume.

I love this idea so much. I’m established in my industry but I think I’ll start working on it and just add to my resume. Thanks for sharing.

Depending on the country, if they don’t give special preference to speedtest.net, they might just block it.

10.4 down / 3.13 up

Surprising that ThinkPads are only going to captive screws when Elitebooks had them 15 years ago.

Every Linux user should try Slackware at some point.

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 removed on Linux. So gamers especially started to removed 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 removed 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.