If it helps, the Windows/Linux logic is basically:
Ctrl key for triggering actions within an application.
Alt key for navigating the UI of an application via the keyboard.
Meta/Super/Windows key for triggering actions outside of applications (on the OS level).
Well, and Ctrl, Alt, Shift also serve for alternative characters when you’re typing. And some application or OS shortcuts wildly combine modifiers for more complex keybindings. And of course, some applications just didn’t get the note of how this generally works. I won’t claim, it really follows rules, but yeah, it’s not generally complete chaos either.
I think it was world of warcraft. As a kid I had a very bad computer, so windows (Vista I think ?) Gave me something like 15 fps while Linux+Wine gave me 20. It already felt like wizardry that I had better performance while needing a compatibility layer.
I have also some memories of discovering a new land of freedom. When i plugged a CD from the library, Ubuntu’s default music player had a popup “wanna install anti-DRM plugins & make a copy of those tracks?”
I was broke and my hard drive failed. I’ve heard/read somewhere that Linux can be booted of a live cd, something quite new back in the days(like 15 years ago?). So I made one a used my broken laptop with broken hdd for about 7 months, just from the live session without persisting anything. It was a pain to wait for everything since most things would have to be loaded from the dvd, but it worked!
Laptop wasn’t running smooth anymore. Tried a bunch of stuff in Winxows, nothing helped. Formatted the drive, installed linux, ran buttery smooth for years until some graphics shit died. Did the same to a thinkpad back in 2018 or 19. Still up an running like a champ but the thing went crazy on the original windows it came with (2nd hand. I’m also cheap…)
I was lucky to meet some real operating systems (VMS, Unix) before I got contaminated with Microsoft products. So when I first heard about Linux (some guy in Finland wrote a new kernel and showed it to Prof. Tanenbaum, and when he grows up, he wants it to become a full fledged unix :-)) I knew already what it is.
Ubuntu used to ship out free installation CDs. Since it was free, I figured why the hell not. Played around with it, loved it, but didn’t use it for much more than messing around.
A decade later those fond memories enticed me to buy a Raspberry Pi and play around with Linux again, and a few years later it became my main OS. It’s just so much fun to tinker with in a way that Windows never was, and nowadays it runs almost everything without a problem.
I’ve been running Fedora for years. I tried out Arch and OpenSUSE a bit this year just to see if I was missing anything, and went right back to Fedora afterward.
Not as fussy as Arch and better package availability than SUSE (for my needs at least). Also dnf is my favorite package manager despite being relatively slow.
Lack of money, I couldn’t afford to pay for a Windows license. After discovering how to install Linux more than 25 years ago, I became eager to learn it and never looked back.
The meta-analysis on Lobsters is also an interesting read.
Oh thank god, Lobsters is the name of the website. I was not prepared for a rabbit-hole where crustaceans were somehow relevant to a dead-end Intel ISA. I already know too much about MCS-51 because of VHS.
MCS-51, as in the Intel Microcontroller? I’m trying to find some link between that chip and the VHS standard, but I’m not immediately coming up with anything. From my reading, I see that some variants of the MCS-51 incorporate DSP functionality, which would make for a good analogue media device, but I’m not seeing any VHS VCRs that use one.
The same! It’s the “CPU” in the View-Master Interactive Vision. They shipped with a poorly-labeled AMD-manufactured chip that could only be an 8051 or compatible, based on its pinouts. There’s also a 9918-ish video chip, like the ColecoVision, MSX1, or TI-99/4A. The only other big chip is some kind of gate array. I’m almost certain that chip shoves code into 256 bytes of PRG-RAM for the Harvard-architecture MCU… so that Mickey Mouse can fight ghosts with a shotgun.
As a long-time Linux user, I feel like it says something about the maturity of desktop Linux that it is good enough now for the kinds of users that find LibreOffice insufficient.
Yeah, I was about to say when I read the first part. Adding windows manually is quite an old thing. Modern linux setups with grub2 will "find" the EFI loader for windows and add it automatically.
I lost my grub loader when I upgraded hardware recently. But, I just booted into a linux USB, chroot (remembering to mount /boot/efi) and re-run grub install/grub update. That didn't find windows. But, it was fine because I just properly booted into linux and ran grub-update again there, and it found it fine.
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