4 ms·

Not exactly the same, but something that got me a couple weird looks at the time was paying almost $100 for RedHat Linux (6.1, Cartman) in 1999. I'd wanted to

Not exactly the same, but something that got me a couple weird looks at the time was paying almost $100 for RedHat Linux (6.1, Cartman) in 1999. I'd wanted to use Linux for a couple years (I thought it looked hacker-ish and had watched _The Matrix_ in theaters not long before that). But my PC didn't have a CD writer. My 4.3GB HD didn't have enough free space to download the ISOs. And I didn't have internet access. So I bought it at a bookstore and installed it. I didn't understand any of what was happening. Everything was hard. I didn't see "power," or "freedom," or anything like that. I just knew that suddenly my computer was a complete pain in the ass to use and I couldn't play games anymore. I don't really know why I stuck with it, but it led to me fighting with computers for a living, which is fantastic.

conradfr 3y ago
Maybe you stuck with it because you had paid for it ;)
- nathan_douglas 3y ago
  Oh, if _only_ I stuck with, say, 1% of the hobbies that I paid a non-trivial amount of money to start...
qup 3y ago
I did a similar thing, but it was Mandrake. I bought it primarily to save having the multi-gb download over 56k. I remember doing a lot of fighting with '3dfx' drivers, X, and network drivers. I only had one PC, so I had to run to a friend's house to google [edit: search for things on altavista] things, then I'd bash my head against my keyboard all evening. I found debian soon after that, and though I've jumped around a little, I run debian still today.
nocoiner 3y ago
I bought Red Hat at the same time, for around the same price, probably the same release, though I don’t recall which one it was specifically. I bought it because I wanted to start learning a Unix-like OS (OSS was not a driving principle for me in those days, though I have always respected and appreciated the movement) and, most crucially for me, I wanted paid support. The first time I called with a question, the support agent suggested that I maybe check the man pages? At this point, I’m an unreformed Windows user and I’m just trying to set up my system, I have no idea what a man page is! As I recall, I was just trying to get into the GUI - not sure why they couldn’t have just said “startx”. Second time I called with a question (by this point, I had learned enough to know to ask the question “how do I create a non-root user account?”), they suggested I hop onto their IRC channel and ask the community. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root. Strike 2, I was out. A few years after that, OS X because semi-usable (10.2?) and I didn’t have much use for Linux for the next decade and a half. Now I run a couple server-ish boxes on Debian and quite like it - there’s not a whole lot I know how to do, but in those narrow domains that I semi-understand, it works very well for me. But even with as much progress as it has actually made in the last few years, I’m not sure the year of Linux on the desktop is imminent for me any time soon.
- nathan_douglas 3y ago
  >Second time I called with a question (by this point, I had learned enough to know to ask the question “how do I create a non-root user account?”), they suggested I hop onto their IRC channel and ask the community. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root. I laughed _hard_ at this. Classic Linux community response. I struggled a lot too. After RedHat I tried Gentoo, and they had a forum where I got in a lot of arguments, got banned a few times, got other people angry enough that they got themselves banned, etc. But I think its bottom-up approach and the absolute lack of filter on the part of some of the users was good, in a weird way. I did start using a Mac at, I think, 10.3, and I've stuck with that for desktop use. So yeah, completely with you about the desktop vs. server experience. A couple years back I tried a couple distros out on a work x64 laptop, and still didn't care for the experience. "How do I get my touchpad to work how I want?" I beseeched the internet, for seemingly hours on end. Far away in the distance, a wolf howled.
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    The must frustrating experience I’ve had in the last six months was trying to get non-free wireless drivers to function in Debian. It wasn’t even a crazy chipset, it was just one of the non-exalted ones. Head meet desk, repeatedly.

conradfr 3y ago

Maybe you stuck with it because you had paid for it ;)

nathan_douglas 3y ago
Oh, if _only_ I stuck with, say, 1% of the hobbies that I paid a non-trivial amount of money to start...

qup 3y ago

I did a similar thing, but it was Mandrake. I bought it primarily to save having the multi-gb download over 56k. I remember doing a lot of fighting with '3dfx' drivers, X, and network drivers. I only had one PC, so I had to run to a friend's house to google [edit: search for things on altavista] things, then I'd bash my head against my keyboard all evening. I found debian soon after that, and though I've jumped around a little, I run debian still today.

nocoiner 3y ago

I bought Red Hat at the same time, for around the same price, probably the same release, though I don’t recall which one it was specifically. I bought it because I wanted to start learning a Unix-like OS (OSS was not a driving principle for me in those days, though I have always respected and appreciated the movement) and, most crucially for me, I wanted paid support. The first time I called with a question, the support agent suggested that I maybe check the man pages? At this point, I’m an unreformed Windows user and I’m just trying to set up my system, I have no idea what a man page is! As I recall, I was just trying to get into the GUI - not sure why they couldn’t have just said “startx”. Second time I called with a question (by this point, I had learned enough to know to ask the question “how do I create a non-root user account?”), they suggested I hop onto their IRC channel and ask the community. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root. Strike 2, I was out. A few years after that, OS X because semi-usable (10.2?) and I didn’t have much use for Linux for the next decade and a half. Now I run a couple server-ish boxes on Debian and quite like it - there’s not a whole lot I know how to do, but in those narrow domains that I semi-understand, it works very well for me. But even with as much progress as it has actually made in the last few years, I’m not sure the year of Linux on the desktop is imminent for me any time soon.

nathan_douglas 3y ago
>Second time I called with a question (by this point, I had learned enough to know to ask the question “how do I create a non-root user account?”), they suggested I hop onto their IRC channel and ask the community. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root. I laughed _hard_ at this. Classic Linux community response. I struggled a lot too. After RedHat I tried Gentoo, and they had a forum where I got in a lot of arguments, got banned a few times, got other people angry enough that they got themselves banned, etc. But I think its bottom-up approach and the absolute lack of filter on the part of some of the users was good, in a weird way. I did start using a Mac at, I think, 10.3, and I've stuck with that for desktop use. So yeah, completely with you about the desktop vs. server experience. A couple years back I tried a couple distros out on a work x64 laptop, and still didn't care for the experience. "How do I get my touchpad to work how I want?" I beseeched the internet, for seemingly hours on end. Far away in the distance, a wolf howled.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  The must frustrating experience I’ve had in the last six months was trying to get non-free wireless drivers to function in Debian. It wasn’t even a crazy chipset, it was just one of the non-exalted ones. Head meet desk, repeatedly.