My father switched to linux (Mint, I think) in his 70s. I was in another state so he did it solo. He had a few questions but otherwise it was smooth sailing.

Traditionally I’ve been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I’ve been using MATE with good results.

In my country that would cost me 20 dollars

The first RAM I bought (SIPP for a 386-16 IIRC) was $50/MB. Jay-sus.

nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

What’s on your “Everyday Carry” USB stick?

• scans of my DL and other licenses
• scan of my DD214
• system rescue ISO
• a TEMP dir with random things I need in the short term
• portable apps versions of putty, WinSCP, etc.

Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?

I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.

Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…

When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)

Wireguard self hosting

I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)

warning: some non-linux included below

• minix
• slackware
• early Debian
• FreeBSD (ftp installs instead of 20 floppies! OMG!)
• Debian
• Crunchbang <-- loved that original project
• Solaris (friend gave me a Sparc 5)
• DSL, Puppy linux (had a tiny netbook)
• **Debian on workstations and servers since ~2014 **
• various debian-based distros on RPI

I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

“You’re not the boss of me” :-)

Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”

genmai cha, as is

ambient

Examples from Eno, the OG: 1/1, An Ending (Ascent)

What are everyone’s thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot

I don’t mind them. If I did I’d block them.

Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.

• sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
• streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
• also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
• a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…

It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.

Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.

I have driven and found joy in many cars: Pinto, beetle, 2CV, original 500s, 1940s Ford tractors, beater pickups including a 1949 International, HMMWV, etc. Mopeds (like 1970s Puch), ratty motorcycles. They all make me giggly.

I had to think a few minutes about one that was just terrible, no redeeming points I could find: first (north american) gen Hyunda Excel What a soul-sucking turd.

Can’t find it now, but someone once made a vi [gVim?} version with a Clippy-style helper: “I see you’ve pressed ESC. Would you like to…”