Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Borax Man <rotflol2@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Fedora proposing to remove X11 Gnome
Date: Sat, 3 May 2025 00:11:39 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2025-05-02, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:
> On 2025-05-02 11:20, Borax Man wrote:
>
>< snipped for brevity >
>
>>> I think that Linux would have been adopted faster in the late 90s has
>>> the Linux zealots at the time not been lying through their teeth and
>>> claiming that Linux was stable and worked perfectly across the board.
>>> Most people didn't know a thing about repositories and installing
>>> software through, didn't understand what open-source was and what its
>>> benefits could be and definitely weren't open to persevering with the
>>> operating system when their hardware didn't work the way that it should.
>>>
>> 
>> 
>> I don't think that would have made much of a difference.  With lack of
>> support for hardware, and games, and MS Office, I think they were the
>> dealbreakers.  I do think they were a bit, not dishonest, but
>> misleading.  It was said that Linux helped you learn more about the
>> computer, but in really you learn about Linux, not the computer (at
>> least not the hardware, that is abstracted away from you).
>> 
>> The whole "Free Software" thing was also a big misdirect.  You don't get
>> much freedom from being able to modify and redistribute the modified
>> source code.  I started using Linux before I knew about this, but this
>> evangelism was mostly meaningless to people who didn't have the skills
>> to actually make significant change to the kernel, or any of the
>> programs.  I felt this "benefit" was just Linux evangelists reaching for
>> something, and being unaware, by design, of reality.
>> 
>> Linux (and Unix like systems) actually offer freedom because you have
>> choices of workflows, of tools, and you are able to compose things
>> together.  The freedom comes because you can craft your own experience,
>> NOT because of the GPL.  Too much was made of the GPL being freedom.
>
> I enjoy the freedom of knowing that the operating system I am running 
> today will run just as well on this machine in five years. People don't 
> realize how refreshing that it until they start realizing how much money 
> they've been spending on technology, trying to keep up over a decade or 
> so. Things become obsolete, but there is no reason for them to be 
> replaced within three years the way that they used to in the 90s. Linux 
> allows us to prevent that from happening.
>

The desktop I'm typing this message on, I build in 2009.  I have not had
a need to upgrade, except for a scant few games I would not mind
playing.  Just a few games, thats it.  Because I don't game, there is no
other issue, at all, with having this "old" PC.  It runs fine in every
other way.

This was why when my wife wanted a new Apple, I talked her into a Linux
box.  WE don't want to be in the situation where software goes obsolete,
and the new OS cannot be installed anymore.

>>> I had a lot of luck with the SUSE Linux versions back in the late 90s
>>> and early 2000s. Tumbleweed was also the first Linux to work perfectly
>>> on my old MSI for suspend (admittedly, Linux worked perfectly on my old
>>> AMD-centric Dell laptop in the late 2000s). Windows has always been fine
>>> for me, but I would also reinstall that thing once every three months or
>>> so. Even in that short time though, it managed to screw up from an
>>> update or corrupted system files.
>>>
>>>
>> 
>> I could not stand at all, formatting and reinstalling.  I customise my
>> system, and losing all those settings, those small changes you make,
>> like that file I added to stop the windows key screwing up the full
>> screen DOS prompt.  You've got to do them all again, and remember what
>> you did.  That was one of my top 3 pet peeves that moved me away from
>> Windows. Perhaps top one.  I very, very rarely reinstall.  One I install
>> an OS, I expect it to remain until the computer dies.  I've only
>> reinstalled Linux maybe three times in the last 10 -15 years.  Once to
>> jump from Fedora 11 to 18 or something, the other two to switch two
>> computers to Debian.
>
> Funny enough, the one feature I find most useful in Linux is the cursor 
> automatically becoming gigantic if you lose track of it. When I want to 
> highlight a word or a text to kids who see a duplicate of my screen, 
> simply jiggling my mouse around makes the cursor huge. It seems so 
> trivial, but it's a fantastic feature of KDE for teaching. I can manage 
> losing some customization myself, but only because I got used to it from 
> the constant formatting of the 1990s. With age, it is admittedly 
> becoming more of a chore which is partly why I set up Timeshift to 
> ensure that I can keep my desktop running.
>

The last time I had to reinstall a system because it broke was over 20
years ago.  And when that happened, I probably could have fixed it, but
I didn't take backups (bad idea!).

My daughter has a laptop for school with Windows 11.  Today its going to
become a dual boot machine. I'm a little undecided on the distro, either
Linux Mint, Linux Mint Debian edition or plain Debian.