Crafting a bash script is very satisfying, especially one liner chained bash command.

I should probably get rid of that if in there....

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/watch/2ae80129-417b-41c1-80d3-d04e3adb2f3b

Cheapskateguide aka "I want others to provide solutions to my problems free of charge".

If that dude wants to see support for his hardware that old, he better write it himself. It's not locked in like the bullshit that Apple puts out.

That ship has sailed, too. I can make pretty much none of the things I use. I don't know how to build a house. I can't make a screen, toilet, frying pan, dish washer... looking around me right now, I see exactly zero things that I could have made myself. Not even a bottle out of glass or a simple book. Nevermind the clothes I'm wearing. I can't even make the fabric the cloth is made from.

Thinking back, it started around the time the pocket watch was introduced. So some 200 odd years ago? At least I think basically none of the people owning a pocket watch could have made it by themselves.

I don't think it's a bad thing, either. Someone that knows how to make pocket watches can make a living from it because basically no one else has this specialized knowledge. And everyone else isn't forced to waste time acquiring not only the knowledge, but also the skill to make a pocket watch. Everyone wins.

It's when there is major gatekeeping going on to prevent others from becoming pocket watch makers, that there is a problem.

I know it's hard to accept, for myself as well, but it seems that the following logic applies everywhere, and most apparent at high tech: If you can't make it yourself then you don't deserve to use it. How many of them individuals or small groups have the means to make their own hardware? But everyone seems to have the needs to use it, and the needs grow up with bloatware, as they always do under consumerism.

This is the computer I use specifically for testing software designed for old computers.

Then use an OS the software was designed for in the first place.

Our intentional built-in obsolescence

His Inspiron 5100 was released about 2004. That's a full life. Put it out to pasture.

I had one that old, and it died. My oldest working machine is from '08, and another is from '09, and they are showing their age with hardware errors. I expect them to die any moment. It won't be worth replacing components, even if it turns out to be cheap. And I personally couldn't, for example, replace capacitors on a modern computer without destroying it. They consume more power in a year than they're worth, anyway, so it wouldn't be cost effective, which his bullshit environmental analysis ignores.

At some point the one guy complaining his ancient box doesn't work will be the only one who notices, because he has the only working one.

That ship kind of sailed. Old hardware isn't useful for the things I do.

If only modern laptops (and desktops) didn't all had hardware backdoors. http://0gitnick.i2p/2021/01/22/article-you-should-be-using-an-old-computer/

It's not Linux, it's people. People have abandoned old hardware. Since it's Linux, you could just work yourself on making it compatible again. No one cares to do that.

Also, I don't have that problem. Void Linux runs just fine on my 20 year old laptop. Lots of slowdowns once you do stuff like browsing the Internet, but just opening vim and managing text works great. But yeah.. the thing is a brick and if modern laptops didn't all have shit keyboards, I wouldn't have bothered in the first place.

Original "research" paper here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QiushiWu/qiushiwu.github.io/main/papers/OpenSourceInsecurity.pdf

Yes, that one. Here is less argument more lament wall of text that I liked.

Beginning, automatic computing was created to save human labour and to provide correct answers; this axiom has been forgotten, and people no longer truly understand for what reasons computers exist. A computer is not a series of digital levers, sparing users from flipping them by hand, but ability to have one lever flip activate all or none, or any other pattern the machine can be taught; following, the machine could be taught the meta-patterns of stimuli relating to these patterns, and to activate them automatically, soon running autonomously, until encountering situations so new a human operator must tell it how to proceed. The goal isn't to flip levers, but to be able to entirely forget them. Thus, when a man spends hours flipping digital levers, it's such an obscene act, against the spirit.

My chosen forgotten realms pursued this spirit of decreasing human labour. The fiefdoms, liars, and cults act against it. It would be inappropriate to express this disgust with computing history, and not mention UNIX, brimming with all three groups. It's responsible for teaching countless people to bend themselves to the machine, never daring to customize it in certain trivial ways, and then pride themselves on this obscenity; the liars claim it was the first operating system written in a higher-level language, they claim it had the first hierarchical file system, they claim an operating system panicking is perfectly reasonable behaviour, they claim doing something once in the operating system is worse than doing it in every program that uses it, they claim things must be this way or similar, and they claim yet other vicious lies; and those fiefdoms are built on these foundations, justifying complicated languages by making comparisons to the natural sciences despite there needing be no such complications in a human construct, taking joy in writing incomprehensible programs, and mocking the people with the good sense to look upon them with disgust, amongst other ways these fiefdoms attempt to maintain their social control in spite of evidence. Those who could stop them don't know better.

I'm forced to wonder if all wondrous technology goes through a phase such as computing currently is, in which humans create it, and idiots build a community around needlessly abusing it. Did operators of early printing presses forget what that tool was for, or find it fine to print illegibly given it was good enough; I know none of these incompetent programmers would enjoy it were operators of their water infrastructure behaving so carelessly, retorting that an advanced user always boils his water.

http://verisimilitudes.net/2020-09-24

You mean the freetardist cult? (considering the userland is GNU and that the licence of the Linux kernel is GPLv2, that is probably the case)

An open-source project is effectively a private venue, capable of banning people and enacting arbitrary rules within the limits of local anti-discrimination statutes.

Nobody has a right to have their patches be considered, just like no magazine or newspaper has an obligation to consider your submission. Your right is to make a fork or patchset if you don't like how the project is being managed.

The Linux kernel is the "Benevolent dictatorship"

The cult shows it's ugly face. jewkipedia also tried "benevolent dictatorship" card, and how did that worked out?

Nice!

Not the best writeup in the world, but further down there's some handy shortcuts for the terminal, which some of them I didn't know yet. Also, just using something like ranger or nnn will make manually typing anything like cp or mv completely obsolete. Ranger also has an easy way to create symlinks and a bunch of other nice features. Definitely the superior way for managing files.

While it is great that Arch can now be used by noobs (and no, Manjaro doesn't exist), they still need to improve, as it has systemdestroy and doesn't support 32-bit processors any more. And no, Arch 32 doesn't count, since it's unofficial, besides, it's not updated to have archinstall yet.

For stability, I've always been a fan of just Debian 10. But that doesn't meet any of your requirements.

There is a Debian fork that doesn't use systemd, though I don't recall what it's called or how well maintained it is.

Could always try CentOS or RHEL based distros like Fedora or some systemd-less fork. I'm sure they exist, but I haven't used any RHEL based distros in probably six or seven years and even when I did, it was always for servers and not for desktops. Plus, there is some RHEL organization stuff going on that I haven't cared to follow up on because it doesn't impact me. Not sure what the future of projects based off it hold.

Best suggestion, especially if you have decent internet and a decent computer: Download several distros, load them up in VM's and test them out. Even if you hate Debian, can always install a stable base OS and then just load up the VM of your choice when logging in. Gives you a bit more freedom to test things out before comitting to a full blown reinstall.

On DistroWatch, when you search for LTS (minimum 5 years of support per release) plus not systemd, you get all of two results:

• FreeBSD
• GhostBSD

Of these, GhostBSD is more user-friendly, but neither is particularly user-friendly -- or Linux, for that matter.

You can reduce the release model to fixed and then semi-rolling to get a few more results, but you don't have a lot to choose from.

The more stable distros have the issue of running outdated software with no way to update until the next stable release, so if you know what you're doing I strongly suggest going with rolling release ones. Unless you're fine with installing once and then never installing anything newer, except for some choice software like browsers, that get updated along the way.

Sure, but for some reason I have an easier time trusting some crazy guy coding his own operating system because God told him so, than trusting some guy cutting off his dick or some girl cutting off some of her skin to stitch together as a penis. Self-mutilation ranks higher on my crazy scale than delusions.

I've actually corebooted all my machines which had a port.

I would love to go full freetard and have everything librebooted, but unfortunately I do need some more raw power than a Core 2 Duo/Quad can pump out (unless I want to wait for stuff to finish till the heat death of the universe).

Actually used it for a few years.

Good distro, but I want to try something more stable.

Looks like it would fit the bill! And I always wondered about Slackware.

Will check out!

https://libreboot.org/docs/install/

There was some drama in the past when Leah, the trans lead developer, suddenly pulled out of the FSF over some allegations that they had unfairly fired a trans employee who reported harassment. But Leah fully owned up and apologized. https://libreboot.org/news/unity.html

Libreboot is a variant of coreboot so a lot of it was not written by Leah. Not in that it matters imo. Leah had some issues, apparently even went so far as to publicly post transition surgery pictures and videos online... which is pretty bizarre I think. But crazy people can still be good developers.

Is there a manual for setting up libreboot? Also, wasn't libreboot famous for having batshit insane developers? I seem to remember something along those lines.