i probably first got started with linux back when i was around 12 or 13. would make a bunch of usb flash drives and install a new distro every week or two
longest i'd go with one distro was like a month and then i'd make some stupid move and break my system and re-install again.
after a while i went back to windows and then in my early 20s i went back to linux. used arch linux for a bit but then tried fedora and have been using fedora for years
right now my main OS is macos because I have apple silicon but as soon as asahi is more mature i'm gonna switch over back to linux. i do have windows & fedora installation through parallels
I read The Jargon File before I touched much of anything aside from DOS, and I was hooked. My first starry-eyed actual experience with Unix was at my first programming job: On a Unix system writing C (neither of which I had ever used). They gave me and my coworker a single copy of Kernighan and Ritchie’s book and told us to get up to speed. The people assigned to us as mentors were more or less useless as far as figuring out how to do anything, so we struggled a lot. In the end we did okay.
We also an excellent computer science teacher who gave us an old SGI system to play with, which she said “fell off a truck.” It couldn’t really do much of anything interesting because we didn’t have any internet to connect it to and we already had compilers on our own more-capable computers by that point, but it was a super cool little artifact to have.
My first actual Linux experience was when downloading Mandrake when it came out, and starting to use it for my everyday personal computing. Multiple people saw that I had this super-weird science fiction computer and heard how I talked about it, tried to install Linux for themselves even when I told them they probably didn’t want to, and then suffered as a result because it wasn’t super capable (for normal computer tasks) or easy to use at that time in history.
For a while I lived in a big rented house with other young layabouts with my computer (Debian by that point) being totally inscrutable. E.g. it would bring up just a grub command line when booted, which you had to type the right super-cryptic commands into in order to boot the actual system. It was effectively alien technology to everyone else. It was also permanently hooked to an always-on boom box’s headphone jack and had a cron job to record Howard Stern every morning to a low-bitrate MP3, which was shared via Samba to the rest of the network, by request of my housemate so he could listen to Stern any time he wanted to.
It was great days. There were kings on the land, there was magic in the world. Aside from work environments, I used Linux pretty much exclusively from that point forward, up until the modern day when Chromebook+crostini and MacOS have become civilized environments to operate in.
Ubuntu was my first. I got a copy of 7.04 from the IT instructor at a local tech school during a field trip back in high school. I had no idea what linux was before then. I would boot the live cd on the family computer and mess around with it since I didn't have one of my own. I was finally able to get a hand-me-down windows 98 PC from my aunt and installed my copy of 7.04 on that right away. Got my dad to run some ethernet up to my room and I was living like royalty after that.
I've tried about every distro under the sun since those days, but Ubuntu always feels like home
The Linux Pocketbook from APCMag, which included a full copy of Red Hat 5.2 (according to this image, I vaguely recall the copy I had had a slightly different cover so they might have updated it). Having it on CD was a big deal back when we still had dial up! I remember how daunting the command line was at that point - like I had grown up on DOS and then Win 3.11, but a full blown Unix system was not something I was used to at that point.
For some extra context, my PC at that stage was a Packard Bell desktop 😅
I use Gentoo so when I want to try a package that has a butt ton of dependencies or other fun things I give it a whirl via flatpak if available. It’s super nice, not gonna lie, and I see the use case of immutable distros. I think they are neat.
That is actually pretty cool. I know about portage, but I think it defeats the point of gentoo. Compiling from source is the point, right? That way the user gets all the speed benefits and optimization for their particular hardware.
Flatpaks are a great preview to see if the compiling is worth the time! Or a permanent solution for some software. I am happy that people don’t seem to have qualms about mixing software managers.
The point of Gentoo is it’s configurability. Gentoo has binary packages in it’s main repo’s and even an experimental binhost for precompiled packages. Forcing one to use any one thing is against the Gentoo philosophy.
That makes sense. Thank you for clarifying my misconception. I think I will set that up. I have a couple of Dell Optiplexes that are bumming it out right now. I can put one to work with Gentoo.
Gentoo is pretty rad but be prepared for the compile times and to fail a few times (it’s a learning experience!). You could even speed things up by setting up Distcc on a beefy rig to build stuff for your optiplexes.
Also one of the use cases for flatpaks I forgot to mention was for proprietary software like Steam, Spotify, and Discord. It makes installing those a breeze.
This is what I use! It's like RPG quests in real life but about really boring subjects. Eg. What surface is the pavement on a nearby street. Or is there a bin next to this bus stop
This is actually amazing. I’ve done a bit of editing as I play Pokémon Go which uses OSM for the background map. I got fed up of just looking at roads so I mapped in all the buildings, shops, parks etc near me.
Just to piggy back on here Every Door (every-door.app) is so awesome if you wanna add/update shops and other small points of interest on the go. Highly recommend it.
My company actually partially sponsors an OpenStreetMap mapathon through our volunteering initiative. I’ve probably put in around 3 or 4 hours this year contributing to maps, though specifically developing countries with incomplete mapping and recent natural disasters.
I think it was around 2014 and I tried Ubuntu 10 or 11. After using VM for a bit I tried it on my main PC with dual boot.
The problem I had was that steam wasn't ready at the time, let alone other games. Steam kept giving driver errors that required an obscure command to be run every time before booting and for some reason I couldn't get it to fix permanently.
Wine was wine. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't
In the end I recall the DE crashing and then I gave up for a few years on it.
Still turned out to be a huge benefit at the time with the advent of USB boots. I remember saving my PC at one point when the Vista endless reboots occurred, because I was able to boot into Linux and reach my drive from there to remove the update.
edit: jeez it had to be way further back than that. I clearly remember the vista incident and using linux, but vista was in 2007.
I haven’t switched. Not fully. Gaming is still far better on Windows. Yeah I have a steam deck amd the games that are supported run amazingly.
Anyway, I switched because as a software dev, Linux is such a better development enviroment. Getting a working C/C++ compiler working on windows without using VS is a huge pain, but most linux distros come with GCC preinstalled. Need to do Java? Just a command away.Rust? Ruby? Python? Same deal.
Im currently using streetcomplete, which is an app that gamifies the experience of fulfilling OSM gaps. It’s like playing pokemon go but you are hunting a street with isle. I found this recommendation here in lemmy so im passing forward, I loved it
Wait until you have to decide between gravel and compacted gravel.
But seriously, asphalt and concrete should be pretty obvious. Alphalt is darker and porous, gravel embedded into an almost gooey (when hot) substance. Concrete is flat, often in slabs next to each other, prone to cracking.
Wiki has descriptions for the surface types, wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:surface gravel seems to be general term that includes compacted gravel, I had to look up difference between dirt, ground and unpaved without text descriptions from the wiki that would have been impossible.
My local Public works committee has a habit of digging up asphalt roads to do water supply pipe repairs, and then filling them up with the rubble when they’re done. What category would such a road some under?
I’m not a specialist but to me, it is all about road quality, asfalt when you can safely drive and it’s very smooth ride like you drive in the air, while co concrete you can drive well but there are clearly visible or audible bumps, so for me the actual material (or mix of them) doesn’t matter, if they can make classy and safe to drive road with glass or anything else should not matter.
Nice. I was using System Monitoring Center, but that’s based on Python and it uses a bit too much system resources, in my opinion. It’s pretty, though.
It was nothing to do with the positives of Linux, it was the negatives of Windows. If they hadn’t gone full spyware after Windows 7 I’d still be using Windows today
Downloaded Slackware at univ lab and split it on endless amount of floppy disks.
This was probably in ..-93 or 94? .. or thereabouts. I was in my early 20s.
Went home and had to come back 3 times, because one floppy was always corrupted.
Then I tried to compile kernel for 24 hours and it just kept failing. . struggled with it for a week or so and got it running - then formatted the disc and started over. Ah good times.
Started using Linux "for real" after Debian 1.3 was released in -97 (I think?). Haven't really stopped using it.
Slackware was my first distro too, probably around 95 i think as I got a CDR copy from a friend in high school. It's certainly not been my daily driver for that whole period, but I think I've probably at least had a linux system operational for nearly 30 years.
I've been using Windows since maybe 92 and MacOS since 86. I think Solaris is the only other OS I've used a significant amount.
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