My first experience with Linux was at 10 years old or so. I had a netbook that I’d installed Ubuntu on.
Flash forward nearly 14 years and I use Arch as pretty much a daily driver these days.
I feel old. Linux didn’t exist when I was 10 years old, Linus was still in high school at that point. My home computer was a TRS-80 CoCo 2.
If you’ve had to mess around with EMM386 and HIMEM settings to play Wing Commander 2, you win.
Does messing around to play Red Alert at 640 x 480 (instead of the default 320 x 240) qualify? I emphasize that I modded the thing to have ICBM carrying submarines for more realism, and played global thermonuclear war with my university course mate over an RS-232 cable. :P
(We could not afford Ethernet, or maybe couldn’t understand it, since it was such a new thing. I recall seeing shiny Ethernet cards from 3COM with some envy.)
I just want to point out that I was somewhat tech literate in the 2000s. and The Mac OS still scared me.
Omg, this is the best early-morning laugh that I’ve had in a long time. Mac-nerd, here. From childhood. Also a Linux nerd for servers. This is so great that I immediately sent it to friends in tech. I’m still laughing like a nut.
I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point on.
I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker…I don’t know crap about any of that. I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I’m guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.
I think my kids may benefit, as my wife only uses Mac, I have 2 Ubuntus and a Mint, and the kids use Chromebooks at school. We have 2 iPad and a Galaxy tab in the house. 1 kid has an Android phone and the other an iPhone. My wife and I both have flagship Android phones.
Sometimes it’s fun to watch them debate over which systems they prefer, depending on the school projects they work on.
Mixed messages here: “I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble.” Fellow human, those are the actions of a programming genius and hacker. The bar is remarkably low. A lot of people can’t even read what it says on the screen.
Peoples’ definition on programming is unclear.
I watched two people argue if Dennis Ritchie or Mark Zuckerberg is better at programming in comments on a youtube video about C.
And they are relatively tech-savy if they watch those videos.
Mac not being able to play any games forced me to mess around with other operating systems on it
Looking at the comments, it occurs to me that we’re not a representative section of the online community.
Were literally people who went out of their way to not use a conventional/commercial tech product.
I wonder what the % of people on here is who have built a pc, used a raspberry pi or installed Linux compared to the outside world.
Considering linux, self hosting and open source gets mentioned in every community here… I’d say it’s a significant amount
I also bet the % is very high.
I wouldn’t even consider myself especially techy compared to Lemmy, but I’ve done all of those things.
I would bet the number is extremely high. I’ve done all these things.
Hah, the joke’s one you: some of us are too cheap for using a Raspberry Pi and instead use chinese Pi clones!
Beaglebone checking in! Although I have splurged for a hardware packet sniffer.
Discluded? Are you sure you don’t mean excounted?
Well it’s not in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but that’s just one source. I assumed they meant “excluded” because I’ve never seen “discluded” used… Ever?
No, discounted
oh nice, 20% off
Must be hard to understand these terms as an American I guess.
I played education games on a Apple II in 1998; I was in the first grade.
I used MacOS for a bit, switched to Windows, then when I was 15 I installed Linux :3
Granted I do very much have autism
I used MS-DOS as a kid and installed Windows 98 when I was 12. Started to use Linux in my 20s.
Granted I am old.
Used DOS and an IBM Selectric II in highschool. Installed windows 3.1.1 in college. W95 at my first job. Upgraded to them all to W98, ME, 2000, 7, 8, 10, and 11
Installed Linux the first time with Unbuntu Warty Warthog. Had the CD mailed to me.
I still managed to fuck up GRUB today again… because I’m very talented apparently.
Did you really stick it out all the way from Win2K to Windows 7?
Can you even call yourself a Linux user if you didn’t fuck up GRUB a few times? 😀
I suddenly vividly remember putting my mom’s Chromebook into developer mode and installing crouton on it so I could play Minecraft.
Year of birth matters a lot for this experiment.
Macintosh versus some IBM (or clone) running MS DOS is a completely different era than Windows Vista versus PowerPC Macs, which was a completely different era from Windows Store versus Mac App Store versus something like a Chromebook or iPad as a primary computing device.
I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It’s not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.
Well you have access to a lot of the same CLIs that Linux users get, right?
I’m not a fan, but I know a handful of professional developers who main apples.
Yeah, Apple computers are disproportionately common at tech conferences and meetups.
I’m a backend dev and the last 3 companies I’ve worked for are exclusively apple only. It feels, to me, like apple took over US tech startups. Obviously pretty poor sample size.
My anecdotal observation is the same. Most of my friends in Silicon Valley are using Macbooks, including some at some fairly mature companies like Google and Facebook.
I had a 5-year sysadmin career, dealing with some Microsoft stuff especially on identity/accounts/mailboxes through Active Directory and Exchange, but mainly did Linux specific stuff on headless servers, with desktop Linux at home.
When I switched to a non-technical career field I went with a MacBook for my laptop daily driver on the go, and kept desktop Linux at home for about 6 or 7 more years.
Now, basically a decade after that, I’m pretty much only driving MacOS on a laptop as my normal OS, with no desktop computer (just a docking station for my Apple laptop). It’s got a good command line, I can still script things, I can still rely on a pretty robust FOSS software repository in homebrew, and the filesystem in MacOS makes a lot more sense to me than the Windows lettered drives and reserved/specialized folders I can never remember anymore. And nothing beats the hardware (battery life, screen resolution, touchpad feel, lid hinge quality), in my experience.
It’s a balance. You want the computer to facilitate your actual work, but you also don’t want to spend too much time and effort administering your own machine. So the tradeoff is between the flexibility of doing things your way versus outsourcing a lot of the things to the maintainer defaults (whether you’re on Windows, MacOS, or a specific desktop environment in Linux), mindful of whether your own tweaks will break on some update.
So it’s not surprising to me when programmers/developers happen to be issued a MacBook at their jobs.
I’m pretty old an have been working in IT for almost 20 years now. Back in the day in would be more like this “hey welcome to the team, here’s your PC”. Someone would point to a desktop with Windows (XP) on it. If your company was “good” at IT you would have roaming profiles, so you could use any desktop with your own profile. If you would get a laptop (usually if you did IT consultancy that would be the case) it would be some locked down version of Windows where you would not even have admin rights.
In one of my first jobs a colleague (developer) couldn’t do his job because his pc was so slow and locked down. One day he came into the office with a CD-ROM that had Ubuntu on it. He just wiped the desktop and installed it. As a young office worker I was shocked! You can do that???
Yeah, we’re Apple only as well, but that’s largely because we didn’t want to deal w/ the BS of the corporate images, and they only support Windows. I could probably argue a case for Linux, but we’ve been on Apple for years, so that would be an uphill battle.
