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Linux and UNIX stuff - a place to discuss alternative OSs.

John Albert

Illuminator
John Albert
Joined
Apr 10, 2010
Messages
3,425
I haven't seen many threads about alternative OSs, but I know there are at least a few Linux users on this forum. I've been a Linux user for over 20 years.

With Windows 11 being the disaster that it is, a lot of people are making the switch away from monopoly OSs.

Right now I have a Dell XPS laptop from the 2010s running MX Linux, and it's fully capable of doing everything my Windows desktop PC can do. I'm preparing to switch that desktop PC over to Linux some time in the coming weeks. My main concern at the moment is how well it can run certain kinds of games.

What's your experience with Linux, BSD and the like?
 
Windows 11 hasn't been a disaster for me.

I just got a new laptop, and decided to go with Dell's Ubuntu image. It's weird using a Linux OS for personal computing. All the functionality is there, but a lot of the little "quality of life" features are missing. A lot of tasks and actions I'm used to taking for granted on a Mac or Windows PC, require extra research and command line sessions, like installing new software.

I've been a PC user for almost all of my adult life. I recently switched to a Mac for work, and haven't had any problems context-switching between the work and home experiences.

So now I have the Mac for work, the PC for gaming and general computing, and the laptop for portable web browsing, some light coding, etc.

Finally, my career has been in system administration, application operations engineering, and site reliability engineering (all three are basically different terms that were popular at different times for the same role and skillset). I switched professionally from Windows to Linux-based sysadmin work about 20 years ago. My experience has been that Windows was much easier to figure out, just by clicking around the menus until you found what you needed. Unix/Linux, on the other hand, would punish you mightily if you didn't already know how to do what you wanted to do. However, once you got over the steep part of the learning curve, Linux was a lot easier to just get things done. The command line is right there, and I can type faster than I can click around a GUI.

A lot of people like to take a side in the OS holy wars. I've found it's quite easy and much more profitable to just all get along.
 
I have to use Windows 11 for work, and it suuuucks. It's much worse than Windows 10. My work computer is a year-old laptop with an i7 CPU, and it's slow as sһit.

Of course I don't care what OS you use. I'm not going to disparage anybody for using Microsoft stuff. But their crass commercialism just annoys the hell out of me. It's like a used car salesman always selling me crap I don't need or want. Even a simple Google search for something like a device driver is loaded with scammy sponsored results under Windows, and I don't see any of that crap in Linux.

Today's user-friendly distros like Linux Mint or the *buntus are as easy, if not easier to use than Windows.

After using Linux for decades, it's like second nature. The bash shell has a learning curve but it's a marvel of efficiency once you get to know it.
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Likewise I have a Linux desktop and laptop, a Win10 laptop (no TPM 2) and a Mac laptop. At work I've used MVS/XA->z/OS, VM/CMS, AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, AWS, Win NT Server 3.5 and up. To me it's like arguing the merits of whether an HGV, a Land Rover, a Golf or a bike are better - it depends on your needs.
 
I too am a grizzled veteran of the OS Wars. Did all my academic computing on DEC Ultrix boxes back in the day and have been on Linux at home since Red Hat 4.1 which was around 1995-ish.

Currently my main machine is a shiny new and very nice MacBook Air; I have a file server running Ubuntu something and a laptop on the same version; there are a couple of Windows machines here too. Don’t really get along with 11 but we’re kind of captive.

My preferences remain Unixy and I like the way that old hardware remains useful. My Dell laptop is a Latitude from 2014 that I maxed out with RAM and runs a recent Ubuntu like a dream; my work replaced it in 2018 because it was struggling with our corporate Microsoft build.

In reality I’m a pretty light user of machines as I don’t game and my coding is a bit of small stuff mainly in Python, so I don’t need lots of computing power. And I don’t care what anybody uses unless I’m wearing my Family Laptop Support hat, at which point I’m always googling because I can’t remember how things work in Windows.
 
Man, I lived through the Win95 OS/2 wars on the comp.os.*.advocacy newsgroups.
My newest is a laptop I bought new in 2016. The rest are refurbs - my Mac is 10 years old and does what I need. All of them can run IntelliJ with a DB and rabbitMQ to test code. Slowest tools are browsers struggling with bloated web pages.
I saw today that the dogpile search aggregator is still going and seems to work better for me than Google.
 
I've been a linux user since the late nineties.

Started with Mandrake, dabbled with Red Hat, moved onto debian and have never looked back.

Ran FreeBSD on a couple of boxes that I built for special purposes and still have the book signed by Greg Lehey himself.

:)

At work I used: CPM/86, OS/2, various IBM mainframe OS clones, and, of course, Microsoft.

It's been so long now, I don't shudder when people say things like PDS, TSO/ISPF, SAS, JCL etc.

Last fifteen years I was mainly doing OO analysis and design, with a bit of server-side MS SQL.

:D
 
“I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago when alt.folklore.urban was invaded by the Newfies. I was there the day the strength of news.admin.net-abuse.usenet failed."
 
I've been using Linux as my daily driver for ages, ever since an update to OS/2 Warp failed and left the system in an unstable state. Mostly Red Hat, but I've soured on them since IBM bought out the company and and now working with Debian. True Debian, not Canonical's Ubuntu, which it far too cutting edge for my liking.
 
Blue Mountain said:
What were Newfoundlanders contributing to alt.folklore.urban?
Click to expand...

Nothing.

Some Uni had a class in either urban legends or folklore in general and sent the students off to AFU as part of it. Unfortunately they didn't come to share stories of their own, or participate in a meaningful way, but instead treated the group as a sort of 'do my homework for me' resource. I'm struggling to remember specifics this far along, but they'd ask the sorts of questions that could be answered by lurking a bit, or reading TAFKAC.

Anyone reading AFU for more than two or three minutes could guess how well that sort of laziness was received.
 
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