Started on Mac. Still use one as my (not so-) daily driver. In the ~30 years in between, I’ve (professionally) been a PC field service technician, mainframe operator, datacenter tech, enterprise monitoring administrator, and a whole slew of other tech hats. In my personal time, I learned OS 7-8 inside and out (ResEdit ftw), built PCs out of spare parts (throwing Linux on some just to do it), turned an old tower into an external SCSI enclosure, built VM stacks for fun (DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, Win95 all on the same Mac box decades ago, just because I could), half-wired my parents’ house for ethernet, built them a Hackintosh from parts, stuck a Linux VM on an old laptop to host Citrix so I could remote into work and have that one extra layer between personal and business, and gotten completely disillusioned with tech as a hobby and as the framework for modern society.
I followed you right off that cliff.
30ish more years of this. 🫠
Cheer up! We may not live that long.
The thing with Macs is you don’t have to spend 80% of your time troubleshooting them. I love my Mac and OS X. I boot it up, log in, and don’t have to think about it. The UI is very intuitive and easy to use as well.
my favorite pornotrope is how people still swear by the belief that apple computers suffer no “malware”, because why are androids apparently so promiscuous like any black person wants to spoof torvalds’ github username
do androids sleep with promiscuous scapegoats?
I take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?
I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
I started on Commodore (Vic20 that I don’t remember much, C64, and A500) mostly with a tiny bit of Atari and then was on Windows at home for decades (I tried installing Linux (Mandrake and Redhat) back when it fit on a floppy, but without a lot of success). I guess I’m too old and not neurotypical enough?
Mac not being able to play any games forced me to mess around with other operating systems on it
I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker…I don’t know crap about any of that. I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I’m guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.
Mixed messages here: “I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble.” Fellow human, those are the actions of a programming genius and hacker. The bar is remarkably low. A lot of people can’t even read what it says on the screen.
Peoples’ definition on programming is unclear.
I watched two people argue if Dennis Ritchie or Mark Zuckerberg is better at programming in comments on a youtube video about C.
And they are relatively tech-savy if they watch those videos.
It was VIsta for me!
My father made me figure out how to compile Linux drivers for a modem card before I could have internet.
Forgot the /s?
Why? My parents couldn’t teach me how to get a modem working, so when we bought a 14k4 modem, I had to install that thing at age 12. Granted, I didn’t have to compile them, they came on a floppy, but it wasn’t exactly userfriendly
Not necessarily. For those who grew up with winmodems it was the reality. Fortunately where I grew up, dsl and more importantly coaxial broadband took off veey early on. Though there were dsl softmodems, these were rare. The difficult part was a windows logon software provided in isp cds. For macos users the isps usually sent IT guys with ‘drivers’ initially and for linux users they sent IT guys to help install windows. The ‘dialing’ program did nothing but few http requests but in those days packet capturing was not so easy.
A friend of mine ‘hacked’ the isp (weak telnet or ftp) to steal the debug version of said software to figure out the requests in logs. Unfortunately the local isp discovered the ‘hack’ somehow and found the ‘proof’ by seeing linux cds on their desk. Isp guys issued a pretty serious warning for their parents that the kid is becoming a hacker/criminal by using linux. This reminds of that famous text.
Perhaps they were provided the driver source on cd. So they had to figure the cd ROM drivers first, which were provided on a floppy disk.
The dad just dropped this one day and refused to elaborate further
How that make you feel? I intend to do the same to my kids tbh. Starting with problem solving exercises they’re learning at school and make it more advanced as it goes just to unblock the OS. I’m sure eventually I’ll need to take matters to a kernel level to be able to keep it going, but I’m fine with that as long as we’re all learning.
It was a fun project and we actually did compile everything starting with a boot floppy and RHEL source. Dad did most of the work to start and gradually handed it off to me to get different things working. I had a big binder of documentation to read through, but hese days there are a ton of Linux from scratch tutorials out there to follow.
Well that feels targeted.
Run a second correlation on the incomes of these families and the tech literacy of their children and see what you find. I have a hypothesis.
I grew up with mac, but I was always so frustrated that I couldn’t play the games and run the programs my friends could on their computers. I finally bought my own PC in high school, and was so happy to have the control I always wanted. I haven’t switched to Linux yet, but at this point it’s inevitable; I’m just dragging my feet on figuring it out.
Download VirtualBox, its free and open source. Download a few Linux isos, actual Linux isos, and fire them up in a VM to see what sticks out to you. People usually recommend Mint As a bridge from Windows, personally I’m liking PopOS a lot more than I thought I would. Both are based on Ubuntu which is ubiquitous. I hear a lot about immutable distros, but I haven’t ventured there yet. Point is you can figure it out for free and completely without hassle.
Thanks for the tips! I’ll have to check that out.
VMs are a good way to dip your toes, but honestly, doesn’t hurt to boot from a USB and try that way too. That’s how I checked of Fedora, which I stuck with and now dual boot with. I rarely go to my Windows partition unless there’s something I have to do that can’t be done on Linux.
I don’t touch terminal often, and I use Fedora Silverblue, which is immutable, making it harder for me to fuck up my system somehow. I have used the rollback feature due to updates with the kernel breaking bluetooth, so there’s the bright side of rollback distros.
few Linux isos, actual Linux isos
like shitpost OSes?
Sometimes the term 'linux ISOs" are used to describe other less innocent files
like porn? how would you setup porn in a vm? still confused 😭
Lol maybe sometimes porn but usually just pirated digital media. As in ‘I have 32TB of Linux ISOs.’
Muy daily driver is Hannah Montana Linux, keeping amongOS running in my server
as God intended o7
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Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I’d add that PCs also had great gaming, which also encourages upgrading, and PCs have always offered more options for upgrading. You learn a lot and can break a lot doing that, both of which add to the experience.
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I mean, I managed to fuck up my Windows 95 just by installing a couple of games. God knows how that happened.
I remember!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can’t remember what game it was, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers…
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it…basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
“Reinstall windows” was such a common solution, I still have my windows 95 and my windows XP key memorized (and no, not the FCKGW one)
And it always took so fucking long.
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point on.
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I only knew one person with an oric-1 is that you, Neil?
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The study is about kids, not ancient beings.
When I was a child I was trying to type QBASIC code from a magazine called DOS into my (inherited) Atari 1024ST with Omikron Basic and tried to figure out why that didn’t work so well.
I played education games on a Apple II in 1998; I was in the first grade.
