I hired into a community college IT dept ~2000. Manager told me they were a Windows shop. Ha np. I proceeded to replace 3/4 of their server room with Linux. email, cd servers, file servers, web servers, db2, PeopleSoft(gack!). I was working on a cs degree which they paid for about half
I did that too, but I came after the guy left and the lady running the department didn’t have the admin passwords for any of the machines. So… When they finally went down, that was the end of printing. I advised her to have the actual university IT department install real managed printers, instead of their windows xp virus infected underpowered computers.
Windows can’t even install its own old products! I remember back when I had to upgrade systems from XP to 7 and the users needed IE8 in able to use some internal websites. Microsoft was like “Fuck you, you can only use IE9 or above” there was literally no way to download IE8.
I also hate it when they only make shit available through the Windows Store or another convoluted process. No more downloading a simple EXE or MSI and double clicking it!
Wasn’t IE8 preinstalled on Windows 7? Wasn’t IE9 the only version of IE that wasn’t preinstalled on anything? I’m pretty sure someone (if not you) already downloaded IE9, in that case, I absolutely don’t know how to downgrade versions of IE.
I don’t remember what version it was exactly, this was like a decade ago, but I just remember that I needed the previous version and couldn’t find anywhere to download it.
Homebrew only supports one user (AFAIK). We had shared iMacs at work, and some stuff was installed using homebrew with the permissions modified so everyone could access what was installed. One night I got bored at work and upgraded some things… Which changed the permissions back to only the user that installed the cask (or whatever) and broke the terminal and other things for everyone else. My coworker was pissed the next time he saw me.
Any sane Linux package manager (I’m not counting Snap and FlatPak) installs stuff system-wide and all users can access the installed packages.
Linux is inherently a multi-user OS but Apple apparently stripped that feature from OS X.
Of course things are going to break if you take something that’s meant to be installed per-user and open up one user’s installation to everyone else on the system. Not Brew’s fault your company’s IT used it outside spec.
Most people still Google “Facebook” to login to Facebook.
The general public won’t start using Linux until the computer they buy from their local big box store has it installed by default. Which for a brief moment nearly happened with netbooks.
They don't even know what program they browse the internet with, manage documents with, nor view media with. They know what button to press. George Jetson is our reality.
Most people still Google “Facebook” to login to Facebook.
Wait, I’m lost here…what’s the problem there? Maybe they wanna use the browser version and not the app (i haven’t used facebook in ages, so I’ve no idea if the site now just funnels you into their desktop/mobile app as much as they can)
I’m just pointing out the general tech ignorance in the world. There are generally people who think they need to go through Google to go to any other web page on the internet.
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they’ve been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don’t necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that’s the case, and it definitely won’t work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
It's funny, the only Linux software I've ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.
I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri didn't run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.
There’s a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.
(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)
At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it’s quite likely that we’ll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.
I’m currently learning FreeCAD so that the one machine I still have sitting around to run Fusion360 can be liberated from Windows at long last. And as a bonus I won’t have to keep updating NoMachine every couple weeks.
FreeCAD is such garbage though. In something like 6 months, CadSketcher blender plugin made something that was far more functional, and FreeCAD has been in development for 20 years and it still can’t provide a logical, cohesive CAD experience.
Honestly, Solidworks is my hangup too, so I get the willingness to castrate yourself in order to just move to Linux finally. I’m thinking of moving over to their 3DExperienceWorks product that runs in the browser. If it handles my workflow, and I can get the cheap “maker” license without them ever asking me to upgrade it, then I’m finally down to switch full time.
The other big problem that I generally have is window-decoration and padding. I need to find a window manager where I can have things with embedded tabs but pixel-perfect edges. I like a single-pixel edge to my applications and as dense as possible window title bars.
Now that Firefox is releasing Wayland enabled by default, it might be the time to try again.
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