Joe Bidet

Even taking time for +1 and -1 content is useful and counts as active contribution!

NB: also don’t beat yourself down if you cannot be contributing financially: there are many ways to contribute to the community by posting, commenting, reporting, moderating, and overall just being active and nice ;) your presence and participation here already means a lot!

oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something…

friend told me “ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it’s called ‘linouqse’ i guess…” so i gave it a shot.

“Slackware”… it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure… it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.

from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating… then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.

… trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise… getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)… until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!

… a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 ™…

… what am i gonna do with all this, now?!

[fiddling…]

[months passed]

… “xf86something”…? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.

… a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits??? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!

🤯

Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its “trumpet winsock” was the obvious, “easy” way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)… reading more about it on this new “online” helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP…

This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i’ll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of “free(libre) software” and that thing resonated within me as something i didn’t know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one’s neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!

3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old…

Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of…

… will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?

welcome home! <3

don’t use it if you’re flying a plane, though!

newsboat <3

to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long

As many people mentioned backups before, I would only add this: Maybe check -in your favourite search engine- if the very same model of computer that you use doesn’t have know quirks (hardware needing some tweaking, not being fully recognized, etc.) with gnu/linux, like for instance searching “$model linux” or “$model $distro” (with the distros you plan on trying, etc.

Also maybe if you connect only via Wifi, check that wifi chip for compatibility first, and maybe get as a backup a USB wifi dongle that is know to work on gnu/linux… juuuust in case ;)

…You wouldn’t download a car?!

same here.

my first switch from x to wayland was on the pinephone and that convinced me to make the big jump elsewhere. that feeling of snappiness you describe, from not having all the screen refreshed all the time i gues…?

check wayfire :)

https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire

I already have everything. I use Sway… :)

as said before: backup first. the rest afterwards…

wait… no alpine apk?! :)

do you think a company like cloudlare.com, that injects its javascript in between given site and you, will hesitate one second before transmitting its data with the FBI (or any other police), and help them tracking users down?

WARNING: contains some cloudflare.com

Those are different dimensions that should be considered together. Of course we should still invest efforts into UI/UX, where possible and where it represents the will of the participants in the project… but when answering questions such as “which FLOSS piece is superior” i think we should always find a balance between those, and bring them together…

The thing I find hard to convey is that FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software for many reasons, most of which are non-technical: FLOSS software is superior to proprietary software if it isn’t spying on you, if it’s governance is collective, if it’s not build to make you pay for things that should be free, if it lets you decide where your data goes, etc…

we’re often missing the point when we attempt at side-by-side comparison of FLOSS and proprietary software… It’s usually one-dimentional, and playing on our opponent’s field: these companies racketing their users based on rent-based exploitative business models will always have more resources than independant developpers to improve “UX/UI”… so I think this must not be the only prism through which reading these things.