[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Anthem

Absolutely. Things are better now than they ever have been, IMO. Your chances of a successful install (without even doing any research on the hardware before you attempt it) is very high, vs. just a few years ago. And with the ability to try out a distribution on a piece of hardware using a USB drive or some other live install, this is made even easier.

Yep. I also got Ubuntu installed to dual-boot on my older XP Home netbook, running the install of a USB stick.

Yeah, this is a bummer. And why seeing people like Intel become so involved is a good thing.

It makes sense for Intel, given the penetration of Linux in the server space. Most of the web is hosted on Linux servers, and Google's stuff is all under a customized version of Linux they developed precisely to run on X86 servers.

For that matter, many of the tools hardware makers use run under Linux. Chances are good, for example, that the cross-compiler that will take your source and generate the object code for device firmware is GCC running under Linux.

Definitely. There have been some pushes recently to make it more so, but nothing revolutionary.

Steam getting ported to Linux might count.

Yep. The Gimp is something I use occasionally almost more like an oddity or rarity. For my basic needs I prefer Paint.net.

Under Windows, it's what I normally use. The only missing piece I'm surprised is missing is an airbrush tool.

Under Linux, it's the Gimp for serious work and mtpaint for less demanding tasks.

Yeah, there are a ton of examples like this in the OSS world.

As a rule, there is likely an FOSS alternative for proprietary software. But if you make your living doing what the software is a tool for, you almost certainly use the proprietary tool.

A jack of all trades!

By accident rather than design, but it's been interesting and often fun. And most of what I've done has taught me things useful in other contexts.

I just mop my brow in relief that no one has asked me to do welding again. All I can say is that I remember having done it. I'd have to start from scratch and relearn to do it again.

Same here. But I'm a weird neutral in that I LOVE most of the common operating systems. Windows, Chrome OS, Mac OS X, iOS, Android (including Amazon's Fire OS fork), GNU/Linux distributions, BSDs, etc., I think all of these things are awesome. I think people forget while they are bashing whatever it is that they don't like that all of these platforms are pretty incredible and interesting.

I'm not sure I love any of them, but I've learned to deal with them and get the job done.

I'm not in the computer business because I despise everything that I don't use/advocate. I'm in it because I have a passion for all of this stuff. Dominant players and underdogs alike.

There will be stuff I might recommend, but that doesn't mean I despise the alternatives. I work with what I have to work with, and find ways to do what I need to do.

Stallman is certainly an opinionated and interesting person. I love his "Negative in the freedom dimension" quote.

I've met RMS, and know people who've known him for decades. He reminds me of a monk of the middle ages, who swore a vow of poverty, and holds and preaches a faith with a fiery certitude. His faith isn't terribly congruent with the real world, and he'll simply be unable to understand various practical objections. His solutions work for him, and he can't grasp why they might not work for others. "Well, Richard, you aren't married with a wife and kids, and don't own a house or car, and can exist happily on an income most might consider below poverty level. The rest of us aren't so fortunate..."

(Like, if you want to earn a living writing open source code, you do so by getting a job with someone like Google or IBM who uses a lot of it and pays engineers to hack on what they use. If you're an independent developer or working for someone else, you get paid to write proprietary code.)

When I was in High School I tried to do almost everything on my Palm M105 because I had this crazy fantasy that handheld computers that go with you everywhere in your pocket were preferable to workstations that sat in one corner of a room. I read on it. Wrote papers on it. Played games on it. Used it as a calculator. Programmed on/for it. Read mobile focused magazines about it (and Pocket PC, which I desired but couldn't afford until college). I wanted to do the internet on it as well, but I couldn't afford the little modem attachment to my eternal regret (although the internet of the day would have been mostly terrible on it, I'm sure). EVERYTHING. I then got an m125, a Sony Palm, the Casio Cassiopeia E-125, loved that thing, and a Toshiba Pocket PC (like e315, or 310, or something). Now we have incredible tablets and smartphones that I use more during the average day than my main laptop.

I still use a Palm OS PDA. The first one was a Handspring Visor Deluxe, when a then employer decided IT staffers ought to have one. It got replaced in turn by a Visor Pro, Palm Tungsten E, and Tapwave Zodiac 2. These days it's a TX. Primary use case outside of standard PDA functions was eBook viewer, but I could do other things, and a folding keyboard was a required accessory. I just installed Palm Desktop on the Win7 box and synced it. Fortunately, an NZ outfit had produced a beta 64 bit USB driver so I could hotsync it.

The tablet has largely but not entirely displaced the PDA. The cell phone is the smallest, cheapest, least powerful model Samsung makes. All it really does is calls and SMS, and that's all I want it to do. Everything else is something else's job.

But the nature of consumer electronics is that everything gets progressively smaller, faster, and cheaper. I've been predicting for a while that at some point, every phone will be a smartphone because it can be. Down the road, I expect to see a unit that will be in a phone form factor, and will in fact be a phone, but will be powerful enough that you'll be able to plug it into a dock with attached keyboard, mouse, big monitor, and NAS, and it will be your main computer.

That's the way to do it. I tried for years to do something similar with my parents computers. But they ALWAYS found a way to mess them up and ended up having to call me regularly to get basic things done. Finally, I convinced them to try a Chrome OS device and some tablets and (fingers crossed) they have not had a single problem thus far that has required my intervention.

My boss at one employer was like that. He had a mysterious power to cloud machine's minds, and things broke when he used them. At one point, I kicked him out of my computer room. "Larry, get out! Everything is up and running fine. If you stay in here, something will fail!" "But I just wanted to ask a question..." "Fine. I'll come and see you. Out!"

(But even when their computers went wonky... I still loved it. I can't help it, I like working with software and hardware and getting things working properly. On the other hand, it does make me very happy that they can simply use their technology to get the things done that they want to do without having to fight it. We have come a long way.)

I have a hard time resisting challenges. I had a conversation with a printer repair tech years back where he talked about having a problem with a machine at home, getting nowhere, deciding to go to bed, being unable to get to sleep, and saying "Screw this! I'm a tech! I'll make it work!", and a couple of hours later, he had. I understood exactly how he felt.
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Dennis