I don't see myself as an early adopter at all, but I remember trying to get some version of Debian running on the same Pentium PC I had gotten to play stuff like Duke 3D, and I don't remember at the time thinking "oh, this is some new thing", so I had assumed the concept existed for decades, rather than being just a handful of years old.

okwhateverdude@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 352d (2 replies)

Right? I started futzing with different distros (all two/three of them, lol) in the mid to late 90s. Had zero clue how new all of this stuff actually was at the time. It felt like a super power to run something other than DOS/Win9{5,8}/NT4. No stupid software keys. Could easily run network services, etc.

MudMan@fedia.io · 4 pts · 352d (1 reply)

The thing is in my memory it wasn't that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs...

I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn't think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.

By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don't use but you've heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.

okwhateverdude@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 352d

It got so big so fast. You're absolutely right. The movie Antitrust (basically a david/goliath allegory between FOSS and Microsoft) came out in 2001! Linux and FOSS had become mainstream enough to end up in a hollywood movie where even the onscreen time of the computers showed legit shells and stuff. Now Linux literally runs on billions of devices, and powers the backend of a majority of companies. Even Microsoft did a 180(-ish) and maintain their own distro for their cloud shit, made .net cross platform to run on Linux, etc.

jaybone@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 352d (4 replies)

Redhat was shipping production shit by then.

Still they could not compete with Microsoft.

At least not in the consumer market.

MudMan@fedia.io · 1 pts · 352d (3 replies)

Arguably they still can't.

But yeah, I'm less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.

jaybone@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 352d (2 replies)

I ended up switching to fedora in the early 2000s. (Which was their downstream at the time.) then later I switched to Ubuntu.

Redhat still has some share in the cloud side server market. And it’s derivatives.

Nobody on lemmy is going to say they use Redhat.

MudMan@fedia.io · 2 pts · 352d (1 reply)

I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

jaybone@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 352d

lol that’s awesome. I have a Redhat cd I actually bought in a cd case from Fry’s Electronics in like 1998.

Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 352d (1 reply)

UNIX used to be a thing for a long time before Linux came around. And altogether now: "Linux is just the kernel!"

MudMan@fedia.io · 1 pts · 352d

I guess that contributes to it. I guess when someone gave me install media (I believe for Debian, if you're gonna be pedantic about it) their approach may have been "there's now free Unix you can just get" and that's why it didn't feel new.

amotio@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 352d (1 reply)

yay -Sy cake

somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 352d

:: Repository AUR

the-cake-is-a-lie

AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 352d

The cake is a lie!!!!

ladicius@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 352d (5 replies)

I never ever had to compile Linux, not even once. Always installed from the distributions website and was done.

okwhateverdude@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 352d (4 replies)

Doing a stage 1 gentoo, or LFS can be tedious but fun. When CPUs were a lot slower, getting the whole distro compiled under all of compiler optimizations that you could muster would actually make a difference in terms of performance.

dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 352d (2 replies)

This is what I was told by some turkeys on the internet back in the day, so I dutifully attempted a from-scratch Gentoo compilation on my ancient old 1ghz Celeron laptop. I don't think it ever finished. Insofar as I'm aware it's still compiling to this very day.

Later on I considered if the architecture of my commodity P3 based Celeron machine was materially any different from the oodles of others in the world, and I concluded that it wasn't. The hell with it.

okwhateverdude@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 352d (1 reply)

The lack of cache on the Celeron CPUs really hurt performance, even if you could overclock. And if you ever touched swap on the spinning rust, it only compounded.

dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 352d

The Coppermine based one I had packed 128 kB of L2 cache and had the same 16 kB L1 cache as its full-fat Pentium sibling. The Pentium version had double the L2 cache at 256 kB, but it's not like mine had none.

It was the OG P2 based (Covington) Celerons that had no L2 cache at all. If I remember right it was only this very first generation which was cacheless, but people just never let that go.

muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com · 3 pts · 352d

I have enough problems with docker I don't need to be compiling Linux from scratch

Sam_Bass@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 352d

Easy peasy. But thats not enough flour for the other ingredients

kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 352d

At least give me a compilation script (recipe) :3

alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 352d

Ah, yes. Every distro == Gentoo and LFS

phoenixz@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 352d

compile

Haven't done that in like a decade or so

ian@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 352d

Ha ha. So funny... what's 'compile'?

DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 352d

sudo emerge based-cooking/cake