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I spent 18 years in the Linux console

eugene-andrienko.com

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Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#71

Post by patrick41638265 »

technothrasher wrote: post #56
hinkley wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed Slackware from floppies in a dorm room without Ethernet. Every time a disk turned out bad you had to restart. Down to the lab, make a new copy, back to my dorm, restart. I hated my life multiple hours before I got a clean boot. Jesus fucking Christ. I think it was Debian that introduced an option to scan all the floppies before starting. I never went back.

Back in my day, I would have killed for a floppy after my 1/4" tape went bad an hour into installing SunOS 4.0.3 on a 3/60 workstation! (Also, see Monty Python "We were poor" sketch)

Luxury!

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#72

Post by darrmit »

This is reminiscent of my own experience with Linux, but I didn't go the developer route and instead ended up in product management via sysadmin and consulting. Through the years, the thousands of hours I spent experimenting with Linux in ~2004-2008 as a teenager has stuck with me. I fondly remember printing the Gentoo install guide out and installing it offline because I had some early Linksys wireless adapter that was super flaky.

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#73

Post by timewizard »

vkazanov wrote: post #9

While I have been using Linux since 1996 or so, and do have quite an opinionated workflow, I never could agree with this kind of ultraconservative approach to things. History never stops. Things change. Linux changes. Not every day, not every month, but every couple of years something has to go. And that's ok.

Likewise.. things do not have to change just for the sake of change. If things _improve_ I'll adopt them. If they don't then I'll stick with my old code.

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#74

Post by saltcured »

My experience is vaguely similar, but a decade earlier and longer and without much distro hopping. I touched SLS and Slackware first, but settled on Red Hat by the mid 1990s for consistency on my i386 and DEC Alpha hardware. Then I just followed through with Fedora and some CentOS.

For the longest time, my workflow has been almost all XTerm and whatever X11 enabled emacs came with the distro. I've reluctantly used other terminal programs pushed by the distros. For work: autotools, make, and gcc before shifting mostly to Python. Plus BSD Mail or Mutt, until enterprise login forced me to Thunderbird. And Netscape and Firefox.

I used to have to run Windows in a VM for office tools like Powerpoint and MS Word, but over time have been able to just use openoffice/libreoffice, partly because they got better at opening MS files, and partly because my career shifts and the changing world around me reduced the need for full MS compatibility.

I've developed a strong "data orientation" and a feeling for the short half-life of most software. My important artifacts are data files that I carry forward over years/decades, moving from system to system and tool to tool. I have a strong distaste for proprietary file formats and other data silos where the content is tightly bound to particular software. Consequently, I also dislike or distrust software with a premise of having such silos.

While I have quite a bit of skill and practice at building complex, distributed systems from my mostly academic CS career, I'm sort of an outsider to many popular end user practices. I dislike things like integrated IDEs, mobile phone apps, and cloud SaaS that all feel like the antithesis of my interests. Ironically, I have more understanding of how to build these things than I do for why anybody wants to embrace them. I don't actually want to eat the dog food, no matter how well I think we made it...

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#75

Post by microtonal »

asveikau wrote: post #62
microtonal wrote: post #54

I didn't have internet access, except for a 56 kB/s modem at school, to which I could use every 1-2 weeks for a few hours. Good memories. I started using Linux in 1994 when I was 12 (first attempt was in 1993, but our computer only had 2MB RAM then). Then started the tug of war with my younger brother how much of our 40MB hard drive could used for Linux and how much for DOS + games. We only got 56k6 in 1999 or so and…

> In 1998 a friend and I had a small business of ordering Cheapbytes CD-ROMs from the US and relabeling them and then selling them for much more locally. I ordered a few discs from cheapbytes in the US because it beat downloading ISOs on dial up... Usually I'd just get the install CDs and then I'd rely on the package managers to upgrade to the next release, even though it took a long time. So I think I only ordered 2…

But I wonder if you had access to a CD burner? They were common by 1998, you could have easily ordered 1 copy on cheapbytes and burned your own copies, might have saved you some international shipping.

Not sure when we got our first CD burner, but when we had this small Linux CD business in 1997-1998, they certainly weren't common where I lived. IIRC it started around the same time (probably got our first in 98 or 99). But at the beginning 'pressed' CDs were cheaper than CD-Rs and people who bought them also preferred purchasing 'real' CDs (CD-Rs had a reputation in the beginning of not being very reliable).

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#76

Post by kstenerud »

I guess that's the difference with me? My first *nix was NetBSD in 1993, then it was a mix of Linux and Windows for some years (with a short dalliance into QNX), and then OSX in the mix. Some work in the terminal with vi, IDEs ranging from Borland 3 to VS to Codewarrior to NetBeans to Xcode and Android Studio and VS Code and everything in between.

And yet I never once felt any loyalty to any of them. I only cared that it worked well enough to do what I wanted it to. Even today, I'm writing this post on a Windows 10 machine, connecting via OpenWRT to the internet, have a couple of NUCs running Debian for containers and VMs, a NAS running NixOS, a MBP, and a Samsung Galaxy. Oh, and a $500 magicbook running Ubuntu Mate that I use for travel.

I watched all of the holy wars from afar and just never got it. Why cut off your nose to spite your face? If it has good stuff, why not enjoy it?

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#77

Post by seba_dos1 »

blueflow wrote: post #66
the-grump wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distro matters a lot for kernel regressions. I run arch and so I bump into those once in a blue moon but it's rare. Debian runs older versions so you miss recent bug fixes but at the same time you should see minimal regressions. Pick your poison. You might be extra sensitive to bugs. I'm that way too but at least I can fix them when I have the source. I also only use a few apps (Firefox, eMacs, VLC, gimp) and i3 as m…

Debian is supposed to be stable, but the last time apt hosed itself is barely two weeks ago. The suggestion with the bug sensitivity is belittling, cut that out.

I've seen pacman and opkg hose themselves. I've never seen apt & dpkg hose itself since 2006 when I started using it. Usually when people say that it's hosed, it's actually successfully detecting and preventing breakage to the system that other package managers would happily let you commit, and it's allowing you to unwrap and fix stuff without having to hose the whole system and start from scratch.

I have utmost respect to apt, especially since I switched my daily workstation to Arch and learned how the life without it looks like.

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#78

Post by asveikau »

microtonal wrote: post #75
asveikau wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1998 a friend and I had a small business of ordering Cheapbytes CD-ROMs from the US and relabeling them and then selling them for much more locally. I ordered a few discs from cheapbytes in the US because it beat downloading ISOs on dial up... Usually I'd just get the install CDs and then I'd rely on the package managers to upgrade to the next release, even though it took a long time. So I think I only ordered 2…

But I wonder if you had access to a CD burner? They were common by 1998, you could have easily ordered 1 copy on cheapbytes and burned your own copies, might have saved you some international shipping. Not sure when we got our first CD burner, but when we had this small Linux CD business in 1997-1998, they certainly weren't common where I lived. IIRC it started around the same time (probably got our first in 98 or 99…

Yeah that's true. I think cheapbytes might have also been cost competitive with CD-Rs which were not super cheap in the beginning.

I believe I got my first cd burner, an internal ide unit, in 1998.

Re: I spent 18 years in the Linux console

#79

Post by jazzyjackson »

blueflow wrote: post #22
the-grump wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, what distro are you on? Second, have you tried windows or macOS recently?

Distro doesn't matter that much, its mostly the desktop environment (panels and settings), and kernel regressions. Like half of my thinkpad fleet now boots into a blank screen due to an regression in the Linux i915 driver. I used to run Alpine Linux on servers, decided i wanted to change to something less exotic and found that Debian is no less buggy. No idea how to go on. Windows is consistently worse, i haven't tri…

I'm addicted to Gnome Fedora since Asahi gave me the option, having one button that brings up a combination of Mission Control and Spotlight has soured my on Mac OS, why are these two different actions?

I haven't had to go into the shell to change anything yet, the default files, software center all work as I expect out of the box, including mounting USB drives which has always been an annoyance to me.

Now I'm investing in learning CentOS Stream and SELinux, happy with the learning curve thus far.

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