With all the refugees from Reddit seeking better places on the internet, I figured I would go ahead and create a community here for Furries who use, or are interested in, Linux to come, hang out, and ask questions.
Whether you are a newbie just starting out, or a seasoned pro who just finished compiling Gentoo, all Linux Furs are welcome here! :)
(I'll come up with some concrete-ish rules later. Just follow the instance rules for now and you'll be fine)
I’ve been using Linux for..not quite 30 years, but getting there, and I’ve been a Linux sysadmin for over 20. I started on Slackware, ran that for about 15 years, went to Fedora, ran that for 12 or so, and I’ve been on Arch since.
Heh, you've been using Linux about as long as I've been alive... xD
Running OG Slackware is pretty cool though! That's one that you don't hear a lot nowadays, but definitely has some giants that built off of it. Given the length of time you've been using Linux for, ever try out Yggdrasill Linux from back in the day?
I vaguely remember Yggdrasil Linux, but I never ran it as it wasn't freely available and I was saving my money for Super Nintendo games, hehe. Slackware was free, though it took a long time to download over a 2400 (maybe 14.4) modem onto a stack of floppies, all while hoping that nothing got corrupted.
Then, the actual installation was quite a learning experience but I managed (somehow, far too long ago to remember exactly how) to get it running. Didn't have a graphics card for XFree86, but having multiple ttys/multitasking available after using DOS for so long felt extraordinary. ^^
Lol, nice! I forgot old DOS backs in those days didn't have multitasking available. Though, given DOS was always sub-par compared to *nix systems, that doesn't surprise me either.
Out of curiosity, why did you choose esrly-day Linux over one of the BSD's? I don't recall if FreeBSD (or the any if the other common derivatives) existed yet, but I know that BSD proper was already a thing by then.
FreeBSD and NetBSD were first released in 93, but I didn't hear about them until later. I don't think I would have been knowledgeable enough to install/use them back then, either.
I hadn't done any serious work with FreeBSD until earlier this year, when I set up my blog site on it. I wrote an article about that experience at https://jsilverfox.blog/post/freebsd/
The site is running well, I..just need to write more articles for it, eheh.
Nice, that's cool! Yeah, I've heard that, among those that know, the BSD's are actually quite well loved for server usage. Still a much, much smaller userbase than Linux servers, but it definitely has a small but loving group for it. Doas is interesting too, I've heard of that for Linux too, but haven't experimented with it. But I know some that do quite like it.
Course in an only slightly different timeline, BSD Unix would probably fulfill the role that Linux does today too!
That would be an interesting timeline where open source BSD variants have all the hardware support and mindshare while Linux is an obscure project in the vein of Plan 9 or GNU Hurd..no idea how that would have played out.
Heh, in theory on our end it wouldn't be... That different? I don't expect the licensing for the BSD variants would have changed the outcomes all that much, the BSD licenses are more libre than the GPL even. The bigger issue might be support fragmentation among the different flavours (distros?) of BSD, unless one BSD version came out on top.
It'd be a weird world without Linux, but still having the Unix wars happen. I guess it's possible System V would still play a bigger role in that timeline too.