I wouldn’t say I hate Windows. I’ve had Windows 2.0 through NT 4.0 installed, but it was more of an application that I rarely started because it usually just interfered with my MS-DOS programs. DESQview was a much preferable option, as it had true multitasking (yes, so did NT 4.0 - but it broke a lot of things).

I dual booted DOS and Linux for a couple of years, but DOS box was good enough in 1997 that I rarely had to boot DOS, so I’ve been Linux only for a couple of decades.

Sounds like I should give Windows another try.

Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.

My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had IRIXworkstations SPARCstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.

Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you’d roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.

I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.

I’ve been trying to convince my boomer wife to try affinity. She works mostly with print, and it seems like a good fit to me.

I’d only use zram if I had no swap device/file.

In my experience zswap performs better, and doesn’t get in the way of hibernation. In fact, most distros enable it by default today, and it doesn’t always work so great with zram.

I guess it all depends on perspective.

I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.

I love that there are good package managers.

I love that it’s open source.

I hate that it’s GPLv2.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.

It depends on how far down the rabbithole you go.

I switched to Linux 27 years ago. My wife asks me to help her with her Windows computer every now and then, and I can’t really do it for more than a few minutes before my blood pressure is in the risk zone.

I used to play it a lot when it was cool.

I thought it was an ncurses multiplayer tetris-clone.

Resizable BAR was previously cited as a requirement for Intel ARC cards, but I think the drivers today can do without. Sounds like your system might be too old to have that. Might be a soft requirement, as in you’ll see a performance drop if you don’t have it.

I’d get a HDMI capture card for the tablet, if it supports USB-otg. Just run a program to preview the input on the tablet and connect it like any monitor to your laptop.

My RX580 does the job just fine. Does 1080p at 3x realtime for HEVC, and 10x for h.264.

They’re dirt cheap second hand.

Overwhelmingly positive.

btrfs every day of the week. The only scenario where I’d even consider something else is for databases that would suffer from CoW.

I’ve been running it on my home server since 2010. The same array has grown from 6x2TB to 6x4TB, one disk at a time as they’ve failed. Currently sitting at 2x18TB+1x4TB. No data loss even though many drives have failed.

I went with endeavour.

Arch is already on 6.0.4. I’d say we’re five weeks into plasma 6. Manjaro is holding it back unusually long.

I haven’t tried MX Linux. So they set the distrowatch page as start page in the browser, and users never change it?

Not me, and not Linux, but a school mate found the following bash snippet online :(){ :|:& };:.

Naturally, he tried it on the SunOS servers we had access to for schoolwork. He got his account suspended for the rest of the year.

I think most Linux distros are configured to kill fork bombs nowadays.

I moved from kts24 to a hetzner arm node earlier this week. So far I’m very impressed.

And DDOSd the AUR.

Twice.

Manjaro also ruined PINE64.

I stopped doing it when Linux got support for kernel modules around Linux 1.2. It was a real game-changer.