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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

    If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

    I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

    I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.











  • Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.

    It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.

    Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.

    Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.



  • Struggled to find beer that I like in usa- I’ve not been there much though.

    It’s increasingly hard here though (UK).

    Shitty lager, or hipster-grapefruit-jizz or guiness is the normal choice in most pubs, and even in many so called “real ale” pubs, those of them still left. A decent pint of bitter is hen’s teeth these days. I guess fashions change and there’s no money in old style beers that I prefer. You can’t argue with the bottom line.

    I find shitty lager in US is not as nice as shitty european lager - it just seems to have an odd taste - but it’s not what i want to drink… I guess german/czech lager is about as good as it gets, for lager/pils - but still not very flavourful.

    Belgium is good, but not really for a session beer. It’s for a different type of drinking.





  • It depends what packages you need, and what they have to interact with.

    If it’s all standalone then no problem until the hardware degrades.

    For example I had laptop (DOS/Win98 ) with a pcmcia network adapter with BNC 50 ohm coax network dongle, 9/25 pin serial/parallell ports, maybe p/s2 port, floppy drive and so on.

    I can’t think what I’d connect that to I might have a parallell port on my PC, but on that laptop I think I only had laplink so I’d need a linux app to interact with that. I do still hve a floppy drive somewhere, but how to connect that to my motherboard?

    So I’d probably be limited to keyboard and trackball input, and audio + (monochrome) video output.

    lemmings on black and white, blurry, slow refresh rate would still “work” unless the hdd got corrupted.

    Within a lifetime current gen wifi, usb, ethernet etc may all be as rare as 9 pin serial is today - it’s still around of course, but you cant rely on it.