work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft
Back when the world was young, I had to produce a fairly large chunk of documentation which I started to write in MS Word 2.0 (which ran in Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups).
However, at around 100 pages, I started to have trouble with file corruption. So since the company I worked with had contacts with Microsoft, I got in touch with them. “yes that’s a known bug, there’s a new version on this FTP site” (we were in the nascent ISP business).
So I got Word 2.0c. Which promptly crapped all over my document. “Oh, yeah, I guess the bug isn’t fixed then”.
Around the same time, a coworker had been telling me about those guys who were busy writing a Unix from scratch (hah, so silly) and who had, already gotten a usable and stable system (wait, really? cool!). So I grabbed a copy and tested that. It ran fine (it did help that I already knew a bit of Unix). And I did my document there, I don’t remember in what, if it was LaTeX or Applixware (maybe that came later).
Since then, Linux has always been on my desktop, with Windows coming and going on a secondary disk or partition, mostly relegated to the running of games.
I’ve been using Mint Cinnamon for a while now. It runs beautifully with fewer firmware issues than Ubuntu on my XPS. Even though it shipped with Ubuntu.
I use Paperless-ng and it’s great. Headlining feature is that it stores your documents in PDF in a plain folder which makes backing up easy. Another software that puts your documents in a database is no good unless it has its own backup method.
Plus being on a network server means I can set up my printer to scan to there as a target, my phone to scan to there, computer, I can drop emails in the consume folder, etc. Easy peasy to get stuff in there.
Set up Paperless-ng on your server, generally with Docker, and map the Consume folder to wherever you want. Expose that on the network as a Samba or FTP share depending on your printer.
Printers with a bit more than basic features allow you to “scan to target” and it’s basically designed to set up a Public share folder on windows and scan and your document just shows up on the computer. Same deal but map it to the consume folder on the server. Paperless automatically picks up and intakes anything dropped in the consume folder.
So you end up just hitting Scan on the printer, the printer will dump the output into consume share via either samba or ftp, and Paperless automatically picks it up and puts it in the Inbox for ya.
I was at CompUSA back in the 90s and there was a Red Hat box with a manual in the clearance bin. I think it was Red Hat 4. I took it home and installed it on an old computer. I mainly used it as a server for testing Perl scripts for my own websites but I did use it as a desktop some.
I was a Windows N/T and Novell Netware administrator at the time and the company I worked for needed a “Linux guy”. Most people had barely heard of Linux so I became the de facto Linux admin. I ended up managing an Apache server and writing what was really just an API that ran under mod_perl. It returned structured text like modern APIs (JSON wasn’t a thing yet).
Now almost 30 years later and I still love Linux. Linux powers my life. I run my own email and web servers. I self-host lots of stuff. I’m not a big fan of desktop Linux but I work on Linux servers all day long. I have no desire to come home and fuck with my workstations.
Debian testing. Seriously. That is reasonably easy to install and configure unlike Arch or Gentoo, but doesn’t come with “user friendly” corporate crap like Ubuntu and its derivatives.
I used Debian testing on my production servers for a long time. They say not to use it in production, but even as a “testing” release it’s still more stable than some other distros.
I use Debian stable on all my servers now, though (except for my home server which runs Unraid). I don’t have time to keep a rolling build up-to-date like I used to.
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