Linux Users Are Extremists

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Linux had it's chance back in the early 2000s, but fluffed it. They had all the information available to say get a particular HP printer, or a DVD drive to work on one's newly installed Linux. And when one downloaded the bookend and the other Tar file to get the equipment working - there weren't any instructions as to what to do next. The steep learning curve was too much for me, when Windows was sitting there with plug and play.

Anyhow, most of the internet runs on Linux servers, and Android is a subset of Linux, and I was surprised to find that my Acronis True Image backup program for Windows, is actually a Linux program - when it wouldn't work on one of my computers, Acronis gave me the Linux instructions to fix it.

And the Linux Live distributions have been great for getting data out of stuffed computers, before one has to wipe then and reinstall either an old image or fresh OS installation.

So there are going to be a lot of extremists around.
Cheers,
Renato

[Eden (Brett)]

I'd be way more worried about NetBSD users (or even more so AIX users, if we forget about OSS), the ones I've known were scary

Oi! I happen to be one of those people! I know NetBSD is a bit of an oddball, but it's about the closest thing to a real modern operating system for my Commodore Amiga :-)

Slackware was the first distro I really liked. Having used Irix for a couple of years before I really got into Linux, Slackware was the nicest transition as it was way more "Unix-like" than pretty much every other distro I tried back then. Now days it's just CentOS and Ubuntu

I miss the excitement of installing Linux. It actually felt like you achieved something if you got Slackware up and running from floppy, fired up the TCP/IP stack and connected to the net via dial-up with SLIP/PPP, recompiled the kernel to get all of your hardware working and then finally managing to run XFree86 to browse the web using Mosaic without blowing up your monitor.

[Octane (Humayun)]

I miss those days, too! isapnp to get the SoundBlaster working, too, hah!

No idea why the NSA would specifically target LJ, though?

Started on Red Hat back in '95. Am a Solaris sysadmin nowadays.

H

Originally Posted by Eden

I miss the excitement of installing Linux. It actually felt like you achieved something if you got Slackware up and running from floppy, fired up the TCP/IP stack and connected to the net via dial-up with SLIP/PPP, recompiled the kernel to get all of your hardware working and then finally managing to run XFree86 to browse the web using Mosaic without blowing up your monitor.

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by Astro_Bot

Linux has/had nothing to do with Mac, OS/2 or IBM nor was it derived from Unix.

Later, many utilities and programs were ported to Linux from other sources, some from Unix, which is why some people think Linux and Unix were closely related.

Linux and Unix *are* closely related at the original design level. The kernel API for Linux was based on Unix system calls. That's why it is possible to port most Unix and GNU applications fairly trivially.

[hobbit]

Originally Posted by Octane

Am a Solaris sysadmin nowadays.

H

Now THAT'S an OS.