I'd assumed as much, but still. As with another company that was once pretty cool, revenues slip a little and some people at the top are stuck for a creative way to maintain revenues, so they burn every last shred of good will and respect they ever had. A sad outcome, but one that has been repeated more than once.Boggo wrote: ↑Mon Jan 16, 2023 8:21 amthis was well before then, it's when they were the Unix you could actually get without bankrupting the companyknghtbrd wrote: ↑Mon Jan 16, 2023 8:15 amI am truly, deeply sorry for your sacrifice. May it burn in the unquenchable fires of the abyssal plane for a thousand eternities as is the just fate of every patent troll.
(The "normal" people who use OSes out of Redmond and Cupertino are sitting there wondering what the hell we're on about, you realize…)
I came to Linux from my ISP's shell (SunOS and later Solaris) and OS/2. I came to OS/2 because I was a BBS guy and it just ran the board better.
My first love was the Apple II, though, having spent my childhood with them at school because I'm legally blind and at that point if you wanted a computer that would talk to blind kids in school, it was an Apple II with an echo! I used a II+ first in school at the age of three, playing a simple math game probably intended for children twice my age. It was there and I was precocious. I loved it, it had spaceships and what little boy doesn't love those?
When I came to Linux, it was because Netscape 2.02b was very long in the tooth but it was also all we had. IBM announced that Netscape 4 was coming to OS/2 … but that while it was now free to Windows users, it'd be a paid upgrade for OS/2 users. I was incensed by this! But I already used a BSD-derived network stack (even Windows does, but of course MS did it their own way…) Most of the apps I ran were CLI tools ported from Linux anyway. I'd have to learn this bash thing, but it was basically the same as ksh wasn't it?
So being a manly man who was totally not a wuss and knew his stuff, I got me a Slackware CD from CheapBytes … and couldn't really use it due to a bug in CheapBytes discs I didn't really know how to work around. My ego took the hit it probably deserved, and I tried Red Hat 4.0, the distribution for wussies that would set up XFree86 at install time so I could run a GUI installer for babies… And my hardware didn't auto-configure because in those days it almost never did. I didn't know how to set it up manually. Hit #2. Apparently I had a lot more to learn than I thought.
Ran into a guy who suggested I give Debian a shot. It installed a text-based system, and I could ask on irc for help with X. It was a couple weeks before I got the help I needed since I had to have a good multi-resolution setup and some effort to configure fonts and colors I could actually see, in addition to manually defining parameters for my video card.
By that time I'd already managed to hose and reinstall the system three times (libc5 to glibc2 upgrade when a normal system update involved throwing deb files in a dir and running dpkg -iEORGB over and over until it stopped spitting out dependency errors. You cannot do a libc5 → glibc2 upgrade that way, you will hose the system. I said three times: The first two were within 12 hours, I wanted to run testing that was new and shiny!
The third time I got some help. Someone walked me through the process and I wrote down what I did. A little editing and I posted what I'd done. It became the basis of Debian's bo 1.3 → hamm 2.0 upgrade instructions over a year before I became a Debian developer. I did that and I still hadn't got myself a working GUI yet. That came in time, though, because good people helped make the community better.
I don't feel like Debian, or frankly any Linux distribution for that matter, is so friendly and welcoming to people who are like I was today. They're too big, and anyone who's done direct user support can tell you what a train of really clueless and kind of obnoxious people can do to change your disposition in a hurry. It's too bad.
I've gotta say, I appreciate that there are pockets of the TTRPG community that're like Linux was 26 years ago. A lot of them, in fact. I didn't have access to one of those pockets when I first got my shiny new 2E books way back when, but I kinda knew sort of how things worked because I tinkered with a computer game system on the Apple II called Eamon.
<keanu>Whoa.</keanu> It's all connected, isn't it?