TimeSquirrel

I mean…my connection is so fast it takes like, what, a minute, maybe two to get an ISO? The Internet is my backup device. I can still get copies of Yggdrasil from the early 90s.

The oldest millennials are in their 40s. They’ve moved on to talking shit about zoomers. It’s kind of weird seeing everything repeat itself like that as I get older.

I was, when I was younger. I kind of don’t want to spend the rest of my life I have left tweaking some stupid theme that doesn’t matter in the long run. Whenever I reinstall, I pretty much just use it as is and probably only change the wallpaper and turn the theme to dark mode and that’s it.

I’m at the far end of the desktop tweaking inverted U curve and have achieved nirvana, with the new users at the beginning and you in the middle.

One-handed locking my PC as I leave my desk with Windows-L.

If you weren’t checking tech news regularly, shit like this just passes right over your head as a regular Linux user sometimes. I keep forgetting about the EoL thing.

Also having a clean frame of reference, if you have been a user for a long time now, you are definitely able to remember occasionally using a Windows machine and seeing the downhill slide literally happen before your eyes as everyone else is unaware of the growing pile of shit and getting slowly boiled like the frog in the pot.

The last version of Windows I’d consider clean of all this modern horseshit that’s in those OSes now would be Windows 2000. Even XP started pushing the telemetry shit hard and started getting sketchy towards the end.

Yeah, I used to install those a couple years ago as a security tech.

Unless they are at the register, those screens don’t even record back to a central DVR. Just a local SD card inside the screen itself. The only wire running to them is low voltage DC power, no video or network. Those things aren’t really an issue in the grand scheme, they are less intrusive than a regular security camera since you can’t even view them live at the head end.

Now the bigger ones hanging from a pole in the ceiling, yes those ARE being centrally recorded.

There’s an entire step between trying to figure it out yourself and resorting to an LLM which is probably likely to tell you to shove cheese into the USB ports. Regular web searching. Forum and social media posts. The distro’s wiki itself or other such resources. You know, the stuff the AI originally sucked up, mashed together, mixed around, and spat back out.

Congratulations. It’s come a loooong way. Long live Konqi the cyberdragon.

It’s okay, you can find alternative install media here: https://distrochooser.de/en/

You gotta put the sticker on lest you forget it’s even there, just being an OS and getting out of your way.

Honestly, good. Getting sick of the “professional” world being so goddamn stiff and boring. Push back against sanitized corporate aesthetics.

It’s not very good at it though, if you’ve ever used it to code. It automates and eases a lot of mundane tasks, but still requires a LOT of supervision and domain knowledge to not have it go off the rails or hallucinate code that’s either full of bugs or will never work. It’s not a “prompt and forget” thing, not by a long shot. It’s just an easier way to steal code it picked up from Stackoverflow and GitHub.

Me as a human will know to check how much data is going into a fixed size buffer somewhere and break out of the code if it exceeds it. The LLM will have no qualms about putting buffer overflow vulnerabilities all over your shit because it doesn’t care, it only wants to fulfill the prompt and get something to work.

Started messing around with it some time in 2003, on Mandrake Linux when I was 21 years old. Experimented and ran servers with various distros in the years since but it didn’t become my daily driver until about 2014-15, with Debian.

I remember some dude on the Internet with a jar and an MLP figurine that might be able to help you out.

KDE since 2002. KDE 4 lyfe.

Jokes never translate well. Even between somewhat-related languages, like western European ones. Best to just not.

Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it’s functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.

have lost GPUs before, but not yet to mining.

I have. Power rails on GPU shorted due to failed MOSFET, blew the PSU as well as the card. The mini-explosion woke the whole family at 2am. I was also running it just under what was considered the high end of tolerable for the card, with a huge box fan attached to the side of the open case.

And if it survives until then will have a couple months of gaming out of it before a dried out capacitor or overstressed MOSFET blows. Ask me how I know.

At 14, me and most of my peers could navigate a file system on DOS, format floppies, install games from setup disks, and edit autoexec.bat files.

Yes, there is a huge difference between the teens of today and the teens of 25 years ago. Technological illiteracy is real thanks to the iPhone era and UIs becoming stupid simple to use.

The “iPad kids” meme didn’t originate from thin air.