They may have been, things were far more trusting back then.
X servers, for example, would accept any connections. So we would often “export DISPLAY=friendscomputer:0.0” in the computer lab and then open windows of embarrassing content. Which at the time would likely be ASCII art…
One of my favourite wars was to open audio files on other people’s SPARCs, somebody had the loudest bag pipe music that usually ended things.
Access to the SPARCs was normally restricted to third year but if you knew the right person you could get an account created pretty easily. Had the fastest access to the internet at the time within the uni as well.
I used to work at a company that did distributed QA. Other people’s tests would run on your desktop. It worked surprisingly well. But occasionally a test of some audio resource would play on your speakers “The discrete cosine is a real, discrete version of the fast Fourier transform.”
I would say Arch because the AUR is amazing and Arch all around is so good but you’ll need to be making a lot of decisions during install that you know nothing about. If you want to learn then I think it’s the best overall.
I actually don’t know how that happened. It was either a youtube video: when linux met r/unixporn or my privacy & freedom concerns that suddenly appeared in like the span of a week
in high school i saw this xkcd and didn’t understand the joke. next thing you know i’m trying to dual boot ubuntu, writing down error messages so i can look them up on the library computers and download alternative gpu drivers onto a flash drive (we didn’t have internet at home back then and i couldnt drive yet… so debuggging issues usually took multiple days). weirdly, i enjoyed that experience and here i am ~16 years later. i use linux at home and at work :)
The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn’t an overloaded machine.
Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it’s been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there’s a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn’t use anything else. I’ve got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
There’s just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.
Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as there a few, but they all fail even at basic stuff like dragging and dropping a file.
People that just installed a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) via flatpak only to find out that the KeePassXC app can’t communicate with the browser extension because people are “beating around the bush” on GitHub instead of fixing the issue;
Desktop Linux is a failure because this one specific thing doesn’t work right now in only the Flatpak version of this one specific application. Good thing every Windows app has 100% functionality and works perfectly as soon as it’s released lol.
Back in the distant past of 2008, a RuneScape player by the name of Icedpizza thought my complaints about driver problems on older hardware would be easily solved by this incredible thing I’d never heard of called Ubuntu. Downloaded 8.04 Hardy Heron and my life has never been the same since.
I got this incredibly busted hand-me-down that was having issues running windows, so I installed Linux mint on it and then distro hopped until I started daily driving arch on a new machine.
I used Linux on my jailbroken Chromebook during school before and I slowly started using more and more of wsl when that came out.
Then one day a windows update which started automatically on my laptop ended up wiping the encryption keys, I lost all my data including a lot of organised financial documents. This happened while I was having trouble with wsl where it would just delete itself on my pc. Then there was the issue of my pc having an English international keyboard which I was unable to remove and windows kept switching me to it every 2 minutes. Which makes programming harder due to how it handles inverted commas. I ended up doing some regedit to remove it, but then all windows system apps stopped working, including settings. And guess what, there was now an update ready which I could not skip because settings won’t open. And did I mention my laptop wiped itself again?
I did not have a single issue since I switched about 4 years ago, I never looked back. Not even for gaming, I exclusively use Linux and I am proud of it. And this is saying a lot, because I always mess up my system when doing random experiments for fun, but there is also always a clear way out. (I use arch btw, and rtfm really helps a lot)
Back when, after the world didn’t end after Y2K got patched and saved it, I was getting tired of Windows and none of my Macs were up-to-date enough to handle my writing workload, I gave Caldera OpenLinux a shot. Ended up compiling everything myself and used that for two years. Had a copy of MetaFrame laying around from a completed project, so I installed it on Windows 2000, and served Office apps over the network so I could use Word in Linux. I’ve had something running Linux since.
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