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I think what I tried to reply here is to the idea of not liking to play with the operating system. I love it. Systems programming, understanding how your OS wor

by pimeys 6y ago

I think what I tried to reply here is to the idea of not liking to play with the operating system. I love it. Systems programming, understanding how your OS works AND being able to go to the lowest level and fix things by yourself. It's a pretty good deal and I'm not doing this just because Apple and Microsoft force their own ideology and tracking down my throat, but because this is my passion... I hope I can stay in my niche for the rest of my life and there's no sudden movement to closed systems that will take it away from me.

pjmlp 6y ago
I do exactly the same on Windows, macOS, UNIX and whatever OS I can put my hands on. When I came into contact with Linux, I was already coding for a decade, used Xenix and DG/UX before, it was just a mean to save trips to the university computer center. After graduating, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, NT/2000 were the OSes I cared about. Then J2ME and Symbian came into play. GNU/Linux became relevant again to me as the other UNIX vendors messed up and it is basically the only option alongside Windows for server deployments. However thanks to cloud language runtimes, the actual OS is becoming irrelevant to me. On the desktop side I rather play with macOS/iOS/Windows/Android stacks. And on embedded, bare metal runtimes for Arduino and ESP32 are where my fun is at. So programming and Linux doesn't come naturally to me, it was just a means to free beer UNIX when I couldn't afford something else. Anyway if that is your fun, enjoy.
xtracto 6y ago
I used to do that in my 20s ?got a history in /.) . Now in my early 40s I still could do it but I just dont care... theres so many times I can get joy compiling the kernel, tinkering with ALSA/Pulseaudio, winmodems, xfree86 , bluetooth and countless rough edges. The last I did was compile a kernel in mint with custom scheduler to fix some bug to play CS:GO. In this day an age... why do I need to do that? It's not Linux fault, but its Linux problem.
- pimeys 6y ago
  And I come here always to remind people in the Apple bubble, that there are big groups of us who are not thinking like that! I'm also soon in my 40s and I had my Apple years between 2004 and 2010. I came back to Linux and kind of hate the word tinkering even. The current Linux system offers something that nobody else does: your own desktop just how you like it. I have my configs in GitHub: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos https://github.com/pimeys/nixos With this config, I can take any ThinkPad (that are plentiful, great HW and cheap), boot from USB and get the same exact desktop experience I've had for almost a decade now in twenty minutes. And what kind of desktop? A minimal tiling window manager on top of Wayland. Exactly the applications I need. The same wallpaper as always. The same editor, the same browser, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same kernel params, the same internet setup. Sound? Always worked. With PipeWire, it even seems to work better than on my Windows installation (and replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire was a one line config change). Now. There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. If something changes in my workflow, that comes from my configuration. Nowhere else. No advertisement for new products, no suddenly disappearing applications. If something breaks from an update, I just boot to the version before I started them and I'm back to the previous state. When updates are leaving me to a state I'm happy about, I commit them to that GitHub repo and they will work exactly the same until I decide to update again. And I run the master branch of NixOS which is breaking sometimes, and it's still much more stable experience I ever had with OSX... Of course this is not for everybody, but please understand when celebrating the commercial offerings how there's so many of us who do not want a desktop experience dictated by product managers. Who are kind of conservative how our workflows should stay the same for years, or decades. And we are still super productive, doing our work and very happy using Linux.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    > There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. You are free to do whatever setup makes you happy, but you will be eluding yourself to assume it is free from corporations that put money into Linux, like Red-Hat, IBM, Intel, Oracle, ARM, Google, .... Systemd, wayland, DBUS, ....
    - 6y ago

by pimeys 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

I do exactly the same on Windows, macOS, UNIX and whatever OS I can put my hands on. When I came into contact with Linux, I was already coding for a decade, used Xenix and DG/UX before, it was just a mean to save trips to the university computer center. After graduating, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, NT/2000 were the OSes I cared about. Then J2ME and Symbian came into play. GNU/Linux became relevant again to me as the other UNIX vendors messed up and it is basically the only option alongside Windows for server deployments. However thanks to cloud language runtimes, the actual OS is becoming irrelevant to me. On the desktop side I rather play with macOS/iOS/Windows/Android stacks. And on embedded, bare metal runtimes for Arduino and ESP32 are where my fun is at. So programming and Linux doesn't come naturally to me, it was just a means to free beer UNIX when I couldn't afford something else. Anyway if that is your fun, enjoy.

xtracto 6y ago

I used to do that in my 20s ?got a history in /.) . Now in my early 40s I still could do it but I just dont care... theres so many times I can get joy compiling the kernel, tinkering with ALSA/Pulseaudio, winmodems, xfree86 , bluetooth and countless rough edges. The last I did was compile a kernel in mint with custom scheduler to fix some bug to play CS:GO. In this day an age... why do I need to do that? It's not Linux fault, but its Linux problem.

pimeys 6y ago
And I come here always to remind people in the Apple bubble, that there are big groups of us who are not thinking like that! I'm also soon in my 40s and I had my Apple years between 2004 and 2010. I came back to Linux and kind of hate the word tinkering even. The current Linux system offers something that nobody else does: your own desktop just how you like it. I have my configs in GitHub: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos https://github.com/pimeys/nixos With this config, I can take any ThinkPad (that are plentiful, great HW and cheap), boot from USB and get the same exact desktop experience I've had for almost a decade now in twenty minutes. And what kind of desktop? A minimal tiling window manager on top of Wayland. Exactly the applications I need. The same wallpaper as always. The same editor, the same browser, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same kernel params, the same internet setup. Sound? Always worked. With PipeWire, it even seems to work better than on my Windows installation (and replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire was a one line config change). Now. There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. If something changes in my workflow, that comes from my configuration. Nowhere else. No advertisement for new products, no suddenly disappearing applications. If something breaks from an update, I just boot to the version before I started them and I'm back to the previous state. When updates are leaving me to a state I'm happy about, I commit them to that GitHub repo and they will work exactly the same until I decide to update again. And I run the master branch of NixOS which is breaking sometimes, and it's still much more stable experience I ever had with OSX... Of course this is not for everybody, but please understand when celebrating the commercial offerings how there's so many of us who do not want a desktop experience dictated by product managers. Who are kind of conservative how our workflows should stay the same for years, or decades. And we are still super productive, doing our work and very happy using Linux.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  > There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. You are free to do whatever setup makes you happy, but you will be eluding yourself to assume it is free from corporations that put money into Linux, like Red-Hat, IBM, Intel, Oracle, ARM, Google, .... Systemd, wayland, DBUS, ....
  - 6y ago