• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.












  • Either Linux or GNU/Linux is OK to me. It’s the practice that makes the difference. While I mostly use Debian, which defines itself as GNU/Linux and I appreciate every aspect of it, I recognise that Arch Linux (which drops the GNU) has a much healthier approach to free software than Red Hat (recently at least), which defines itself as GNU/Linux but adds clauses to RHEL which are against the spirit of free software. I prefer using GNU/Linux because, as a statement, respects things that are important to me. Of course, I am totally cool with other people using any term they feel more comfortable with.



  • That was really nice but I think the lady was lucky that she met you. Can you imagine if she had met Linux Torvalds himself? He would have told her off for not knowing that the 2.6 kernel was many years old, the whole Linux world had moved on with strides beyond this old piece of software and reached 6.5 and there was no reason wasting everyone’s time with this kind of question. Plus: “we never, ever break the user experience and hence the mouse should work without questions!”


  • This appears to be true on the surface but is not accurate. I am a structural engineer and when people need to do something with their buildings, the engineers (structural, mechanical, fire, etc.) and the architects need the plans or at least a survey. If a side has the plans and the authority on the plans, that side has huge leverage over the building. Fortunately, this is never the case with buildings. Plans are considered public information. It would be so much better if the same applied to software.




  • One of the many values of GNU/Linux, and free software in general, is choice. You don’t have to use any particular distro if it doesn’t fit your use case or preferences. I don’t use Gentoo but really appreciate that it exists. If I ever wanted more control over my system, I could turn to this tried and tested distro. I am quite lazy these days and from a short period of breaking Arch, I started breaking Debian, then staying with Debian stable without breaking it and now I have moved to MX Linux, which is Debian that someone else (the MX/Antix team) have set up in the way that I want without having to install everything myself. But, yes. There is great value in Gentoo (like in Kali, Tails, Slackware, Guix, etc).


  • They can all serve the same purpose. The advantages of 7zip are the following:

    1. It is totally free (as both in free beer and free speach)
    2. The 7z compression format is superior to rar because it can compress either more or faster (not both though)
    3. The rar format is proprietary. You are free to decompress but not to compress. In a business setting, you could theoretically get in trouble if you don’t have a license. In some countries, e.g. USA, even outside a business setting. But if you have been using winrar forever, I can’t see you changing your ways anytime soon! :)