I didn’t have a lot of money and went dumpster diving for parts. Changed out a bad capacitor and got a system booting. This was back in Pentium 3 and 4 days. I found a 512MB stick of memory that had some bad areas. Linux was able to map around it with some kernel options at boot. Since I had limited storage I used knoppix and had a print out of the needed kernel options and memory addresses.
Once it was up and running I was able to do anything and everything I wanted. I did built a better system and got gentoo going a year or so later.
Eventually I got gaming mostly working with the project that eventually became crossover. First software I ever purchased too. I started dual booting less.
I bounced back and forth between windows and Linux and when I built a system around 2010 I didn’t even bother configuring it for dual booting.
I haven’t really touched anything windows since around the release of Windows 10 and only used windows 7 for work reasons prior. These days I’m pretty useless with anything on that end.
So I’m an evangelical fan of Linux. I use it everywhere I can and the FOSS philosophy resonates with me. I advocate for it where it makes sense and works. I’ll go out of my way and spend time & money helping people move into it too.
If I remember correctly, you can define the modifier key in KDE. Not sure though, you might have to test it out.
That would be the fastest way. Apart from that, it’s very much possible by binding every possible action to different keypresses. That would be long and stenuous.
However, it should be said that these will only apply within KDE applications. If you’re using third-party stuff, like Firefox, GIMP, VLC etc., they won’t apply.
If you really want to go hard on rebinding all kinds of keys for any application, you can also do things like these:
As cool as both of these are, and as much as I would still generally recommend picking KDE for these kind of customization possibilities, I wouldn’t recommend overdoing either. You won’t be able to use other PCs anymore…
I actually went through and customized all the Plasma keybindings to be more like Mac a couple days ago. It works pretty well, but yeah unfortunately only in KDE applications. And there’s still some stuff you can’t change such as the “extend selection to start/end of word” shortcuts always being set to ctrl+shift+left/right even if you set the “move to start/end of word” keys to option+left/right.
Just curiosity really, it was when I first started learning Java from my father’s old textbook. The “Getting your environment setup” had instructions for both Windows, OS X, and Linux/Ubuntu.
Of them all, the instructions for Ubuntu were the simplest (sudo apt-get install openjdk or a similar package), in order to get the Java dev tools installed.
Ended up giving Ubuntu a look in a VM since I hadn’t heard of “Linux/Ubuntu” (which was also the first time I used a VM) during the 8.04 days!
Funnily enough I actually put Java down for a bit since I just couldn’t get into it. IIRC though, my first project on my GitHub had something to do with Python+GTK. Then eventually I got back into Java when I discovered I could make Minecraft plugins/mods.
Of course I was pretty young at the time, maybe 13 or 14? So I didn’t know (or would’ve cared) about the whole privacy aspect of Linux - that came much later. But ever since then, like many others, I’ve always maintained that Linux is the best development environment for me.
I was learning C/C++ back then and although the nostalgia is strong with this one, Turbo C++ was obviously shit (and Borland quickly killed it later anyway), and while looking around for alternatives I found DJGPP which introduced me to the GNU toolchain and so the jump to Linux to have all of that natively instead of running on DOS was very natural. My very first distro was Redhat Linux 6.2 that I got as a free CD along with a magazine (also got a Corel Linux CD the same way that I was excited about given how their WordPerfect was all the rage back then but I was never able to install it, I don’t remember what the issue was) and it looked like this (screenshot from everythinglinux.org/redhat62/index.html ):
Windows ME came out. After installing it and wasting a bunch of time trying to get it to work reliably, I wiped the HDD and installed Debian potato instead. That was 23 years ago.
Up until February this year, I was still using a 14 year old DDR2 desktop. Windows 10 started to get quite slow and had some annoying crashes (mainly the fault of my goofy old hardware, of course)
I learned about Linux as an alternative through a Linux Tech Tips video about gaming on Linux, and Valve’s announcement of the Steam Deck, I was also interested in FOSS apps as alternative to proprietary ones.
Decided to try Linux Mint. With no prior experience with Linux, lack of luck finding good tutorials, and some weird thing happening with my games not launching, I had a very rough start.
But thanks to Mint, suddenly my DDR2 desktop got a lot smoother :D also, all of my drivers worked out of the box, and I got very surprised with Linux’s plug-and-play hardware capabilities.
So I decided to learn how to use it, tinkered alot with my system, and broken it alot! It was kind of frustrating, but fun at same time.
And without noticing, I had already learned lots about Linux from a more technical, and then, philosophical point of view.
Now I’m a great fan of Linux and FOSS, and have been helping friends to move to it by giving support with issues I had in the past.
It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.
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