Frater Mus

Traditionally I’ve been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I’ve been using MATE with good results.

In my country that would cost me 20 dollars

The first RAM I bought (SIPP for a 386-16 IIRC) was $50/MB. Jay-sus.

My guess is this reaction is what happens when community posts show up in All. Communities really need an option to keep posts in house.

nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

pupoose

What’s on your “Everyday Carry” USB stick?

• scans of my DL and other licenses
• scan of my DD214
• system rescue ISO
• a TEMP dir with random things I need in the short term
• portable apps versions of putty, WinSCP, etc.

Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?

I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.

Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…

When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)

Wireguard self hosting

I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)

warning: some non-linux included below

• minix
• slackware
• early Debian
• FreeBSD (ftp installs instead of 20 floppies! OMG!)
• Debian
• Crunchbang <-- loved that original project
• Solaris (friend gave me a Sparc 5)
• DSL, Puppy linux (had a tiny netbook)
• **Debian on workstations and servers since ~2014 **
• various debian-based distros on RPI

I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)

Yeah, they look like horses and act like cats. My grey was the finest doggo I ever had.

I’m not a fan of the Mises Caucus, so I think this is hilarious.

Same. the Mises Caucus was to the LP as Trump was to the GOP - a takeover by opportunists.

I know next to nothing about Chase Oliver

• his platform page.
• and his positions as described on wikipedia

Seems broadly in line with (pre-Mises Caucus) libertarianism. Definitely more in line with my thinking than anything the D or R parties are putting out.

being gay and young will certainly set him apart from the old men he’s competing against

I don’t think young and gay necessarily carries intrinsic benefit, but I agree there is some instrumental benefit. It will set him apart as you say, and also will reveal bigots and reactionaries for what they are.

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”

Can’t find it now, but someone once made a vi [gVim?} version with a Clippy-style helper: “I see you’ve pressed ESC. Would you like to…”

any idea why distrowatch periodically goes down for days before returning.

My guess is it’s run as a hobby by A Guy “on his own time and his own dime”.

I mainly use it to find out if some distros have updates to their ISOs but I find it very annoying that quite frequently it’s down completely.

You might follow the RSS feed. Your feedreader would catch new posts whenever they are available.

the site is still up, at least.

In the early 90s I was running a BBS on DesqView over DOS and was annoyed by the limitations. My older hardware didn’t have grunt or RAM (SIPP at $50/MB) to run OS/2 like the big dogs. I also had nearly no money (grad student).

I started experimenting with MINIX, and from there to linux. IIRC I started with Slackware, flirted with Red Hat, then found Debian and it was true lurve. Since that time I’ve generally run servers on Debian stable and workstations on Debian testing.