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ik5pvx @lemmy.world
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Comments 90
Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)
  • It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.

    You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.

    You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!

    You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.

    You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.

    You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who'd have had the last laugh.

    And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn't last much.

  • what linux OS should I install on a backup notebook if my main one is debian?
  • It is very usable, provided you pay attention to major upcoming changes. To give you a very recent example, during May they switched the time libraries to use 64 bits, and like others said, it was dependency hell until the tide of all the packages being recompiled passed. In those cases, unless you know EXACTLY what to do, it's better to wait for updates to come in, let apt sort out what could be updated and what had to wait, and just make sure it doesn't propose you to delete things. After 2 weeks it was all business as usual. Side note: aptitude (my package manager of choice) was unusable, while apt threaded on and pulled me out of the tangle.

  • when you upgrade an OS, do you clean install or upgrade?
  • Clean install on a new computer. Then upgrades until the computer gets retired. Debian at home, Ubuntu server at work.

    I like playing with distros and other OSes in VMs, if the thing doesn't have a well defined upgrade procedure it gets ditched pretty soon.