Personal: DOS -> Win3.1/95 -> BeOS -> WinXP -> MacOS -> Win10 -> Ubuntu -> Debian

There was definitely some dual booting in there, particularly in the BeOS (to Windows for Games) and Win10 (to Ubuntu for work) eras.

Professional: Debian -> RHEL -> WinXP -> Win7 -> Ubuntu -> gLinux/ChromeOS -> Ubuntu -> MacOS -> Ubuntu -> MacOS/Ubuntu

I had a college professor that I worked for who was basically the Emacs Enthusiast. So I gave it a try, learned about a half dozen commands and never really moved past that. Later, I was told to give vi a try, so I did and had basically the same experience. Built-in discoverability is/was non-existent for them and I never had a real need to pick up any more or spend hours reading man pages to figure them out. Time past, I went through a few different phases of GUI text editors/IDEs but could always pull out just enough vi or emacs commands when I needed. I did see my colleagues and friends who were all in on vim/emacs with 1000 line configs and thought they looked pretty cool, but I just didn’t have the time or inclination when I could be doing other things.

Then in the last year I needed to go all in on a text mode editor for a variety of reasons. I looked around, gave Helix a try, and loved it from the beginning. My few vi commands worked, there is actual discoverability built in, and the select->action grammar makes way more sense to me than the others I’ve tried.

Helix is not as extremely customizable or configurable as vi or emacs (yet, plugin system coming soon™ ) but it has a good default out-of-the-box configuration, enough configuration options for what I want, good lsp support, and discoverability.

I think I managed to skip the ndiswrapper era. I was using Ethernet on desktops and my laptops were Macs. Nowadays my desktop has both wifi and Ethernet, and my laptops run Linux but nmtui just works.

I definitely remember having to futz with audio a looooong time ago, but honestly getting xf86config to work with my video card and monitor was much more difficult.

Hey! I’m not 50 yet!

Though not far off TBF.

The Haiku one should be the yellow one.

Is that an ASCII version of the praying hands emoji?!?

I’m really curious as to what those features would be?

I’m pretty sure working with software is the other.

Ah! Thank you for the detailed explanation so I can properly enjoy this joke.

I once heard someone say that Debian is like the sound Dads make when getting off the couch. I’ve never felt so seen.

(I absolutely run Debian, lol)

Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.

Here, here!

Even with the explanation, I still don’t get it either. I have some questions:

1. What is a boy kisser meme?
2. What is good or bad about being called out in reference to one?
3. Who was doing the calling out or being called? Was OP called out by Krita, Krita by OP, or some third party calling out one or the other? Or maybe a third party was called out by Krita?
4. What does this image have to do with Krita or the other OSS projects in the background?

Feel free to assume that I am old and not hip to what kids are doing these days.

That’s pretty much it. The most obvious difference between Debian and Fedora is that Debian uses apt with deb files for package management, while Fedora uses dnf and rpm files.

Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.

Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.

Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.

The typical advice is:

• Mint
• ElementryOS
• Fedora
• Pop!
• Ubuntu (unpopular with Extremely Online people, but is pretty good at the Just Works for normies)
• Debian Stable for older hardware

As someone who builds a computer, installs whatever seems like the most stable LTS distro at the time with the longest support period, and only switches to a new one when the current LTS expires, I’d like to thank all of you for being my beta testers. Your support means the world.

I’m more of a Zmodem guy.

Never doubt the power of nerds arguing over their specific interests to make something amazing. Wikipedia is arguably one of the greatest achievements of humankind, entirely powered by nerd fights.