All I remember about my first time is being tricked into using Slackware. They told me it was the easiest distro. And this was in like 94 or 95; just a year or two after the damn thing came out.
Slackware was mine too - all it took was a box of floppy disks and tens of hours of downloading and installing! It was great though, something so different. But it was just a toy, and I went back to DOS/Windows on PC - mainly for the games and hardware support (Voodoo!)
A year or so later I spent a lot of time playing with Solaris and VAX/VMS at University and really developed a love for the command-line and UNIX environment. It was that which led me to my first job (with HP-UX) and my second (Debian/Yellow Dog). From then on I used it at home a lot more. Now I use Windows for games/gamedev, and Ubuntu for everything else (desktop, laptop, servers).
But it’s amazing how far things have come in some respects, but how some things have regressed over those 20 years - window managers/themes never reached the heights I envisioned in the Enlightenment hay day, session management/restoration/remoting seems to have been eroded away, virtual desktops/window management/tiling regressed and became fractured, the wonder of Compiz didn’t really move things in an interesting way, and I felt sure Quicksilver (for MacOS) was the future of launcher, but it’s not really been taken up - though the Expose feature is an excellent essential part of Gnome now (Activities)!
In some ways I think Linux has lost that “wow factor” that we used to have with all those cool features - but it is much more rock-solid and professional now! I use it more now than I ever have.
I think I used to wardrive around and add open wifi hotspots to that system when I was like 18/19. I had Linux on a laptop and had gotten a crazy wifi antenna and a USB GPS module (along with some less than legal software to crack WEP encryption) and would drive around in my van looking for routers I could hop onto and map which ones worked and had internet.
I’m not sure what map software I was using though. It was some open source thing.
Windows kept annoying me. Somewhat ironically, the last straw for me was right after I tried linux for the first time using a live usb. Upon trying to go back into windows, BitLocker locked me out for changing secure boot settings. I thought, no problem, I’ll go online and get my recovery key. I go online to discover there’s no bitlocker recovery key. After some investigation, I found out if your OneDrive is locked down (for me because I went over my storage limit, something that only happened because windows insists on uploading all of your personal files to onedrive) you can’t get your recovery keys. I deleted the stuff but had to wait a full day before onedrive was unlocked and I got my recovery keys.
So, in summary, windows locked me out of my computer that I own because I tried another OS, then didn’t give me the option to unlock my device because I used too much storage in the cloud service they made me use. No thanks, I’d rather have control over the device I paid for and I own rather than it being controlled by some massive corporation.
And I gotta say, when you actually learn how to interface with your device on a deeper level, having complete control over everything is super nice. Also, the unix-style command line makes way more sense and is far easier to learn than the windows command line IMO. While a lot of newer Linux distros don’t need you to use the console, it is really nice to know how for more advanced usage.
I really honestly wish more Linux users would throw open their personal libraries of scripts that made their lives easier. Yes, probably 99% of them are super idiosyncratic to do This One Thing the user needed done or are the same ten or fifteen everyone has discovered for themselves but I bet most of them have a piece of code in them that’s does this thing I didn’t know I could automate or could be a template for this other thing I want to do and didn’t even know where to start or I just want to look at and go ‘wow, you really went all out with that, this is art I want to frame this, holy shit’ even though all it does is like move a file.
I installed Ubuntu, ran it for a few hours on a pentium 4 box. Thought it was neat but not neat enough to switch over after I realized I couldn’t play the games I wanted.
I eventually got fed up with windows updates and instability with random shit and developers shitting in the registry and weird permissions issues and all that and switched. Now a days I run pop os on my laptops and desktop with a side rig just for finicky games and windows only shit id rather not configure for my main systems. I have a steam deck too. I’m 👌 close to giving up windows all together but I still like having trash box I can format at anytime.
@eric5949 Late nineties. Joined a computer club at uni and got to play with aix, hp-ux, vms, linux, netbsd, freebsd, nextstep, amiga... Installed FreeBSD on my own box and experienced the, eh, joy of "make world", though making X Windows took longer. I kept Windows around for games but stopped even that around.. Nintendo 3DS. Used windowmaker for at least a decade, now on KDE Neon.
@eric5949 Red Hat 5.1 1998/99, I was aged 40. I attempted dual booting with Win98, but Disk Druid wiped my Win98 partition:-) I was a little upset but stayed with RH. I had actually purchased the RH CD's and manual from the US (I am in the UK), and incurred import duty, so it was not free as in beer but around £50. I looked at Windows again when 2000 was released. Now I use Linux Mint, Chrome OS and Windows 11.
I had literally the exact same experience with the installer corrupting my Windows partition and me accepting the indication and just switching to Linux-only. 🙂
Yes, I moved in St Lucia, a small Caribbean island (~620km) few years ago.
Openstreetmap already had a lot of information but nothing on the land use (forest, field …). So over almost a year I’ve worked on it to add all the forest using satellite imagery. Most of the community names were missing so I’ve also added around 100 names and plenty of roads and buildings.
I’ve also started to add all the rivers and stream using public data but this is still underway.
I think it was about 1995. I was going to the university and was looking for something Unix compatible I could use at my home computer to perform assignments instead of needing to go into school computer lab. Remote work basically. Think I was using LessTif instead of Motif for some coding task.
Ahh. Those were the days. Used modem to connect to school and connect remotely to the network using Linux. :)
I’ve been editing OSM for years. (896,339 edits in 3,427 changesets, apparently!) For me, it’s all about the free data. I once got a thank you note from someone who worked for a city with a particularly large municipal park. I’d added almost all the trails to the park and other information, and they’d used it to produce a printed map for the general public. Exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped for!
Personally, I do a lot of dualsport motorcycling and most backcountry maps around here are subpar. I map tons of trails and 2track and put them on the Garmin so I know where I’m going.
OSM is also great in lots of Europe–tons of detail.
JOSM is great.
Someone just recommended Organic Maps for the phone–it’s way snappier than Google Maps, but still not great with finding addresses.
I’ve had the best luck with BBBike and OpenMapChest for getting pre-built map files.
Basically you have to get one of these files with all the data you want in it and then stick it on your SD card on the GPS. (The GPS should mount like a thumb drive. If you already have a gmapsupp.img file on there, you might want to back it up in case things go sideways.) Some GPSes support multiple gmapsupp.img files, but a lot don’t. Here’s a thread on merging .
When I needed super fresh data, I’d download raw OSM data from Overpass and use mkgmap to build the gmapsupp.img.
That’s really cool to hear about the parks. Most of the parks around here are pretty well mapped out. Presumably the local community is pretty strong.
I really want to produce something for my city’s NET and BEECN emergency response programs. They already have a few different maps, but not one unified map. My ideal is a map that could be taken offline or printed to spec.
As others have mentioned, I really recommend StreetComplete. I used it for my city and it’s a nice and helpful way as well to walk around what would otherwise be a boring scenery I’ve seen too many times.
I do get looks when I walk up and down stairs trying to count the steps though.
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