oo1

yeah I paid a lot for an apple laptop in 2008. (more than the hardware was worth - but the form factor was good)
It was okay, and osx was ok for most stuff for a few years .

But they cut support for updates well within 10 years and the version I was stuck on eventually just got too far behind on security updates and couldn’t even get firefox updates and stuff.
So they forced me back tolinux full time - thankfully dual bootng macos+linux was really easy on the old x86 ones.

It seems you have to keep shipping them big buckets of dollars every 5 years or so - fuck that.
I’d much rather just give the odd bit of pay-what-you-can/ tip jar to a few linux projects than chuck out perfectly good hardware every few years.

There’s always tinycorelinux for hardcore minimalists.
I can’t say about package support either - i’ve not used it enough, but theres a “dcore” extension that lets you acess debian repos.

I’ve installed it on a potato easily enough - and I did find it to be astonishing for how small it is.

But I don’t use it day to day, or much at all, so i’m not going to endorse it.
It’s not necessarily the most user friendly. and some people might cal the gui slightly dated - persnally i did like that.

So this is just make you aware of one of the lightest distros I know of (that is sort of usable out of the box)
Recommended: spec is 128mb ram and pentium2. min spec 46mb ram (maybe thats without the gui desktop environment)

It’s possibly a bit lighter than antix - for some reason i never quite got on with either antix or mx - not sure why.

steam deck? I wonder how many full-time staff valve devotes to testing and pushing regular updates.

I think a lot of arch people want the bleeding edge updates, so it seems a lot like to go btrfs or and setup snaphots or something if they want a safety net.

TLDR;
Doom was massively popular in it’s day because it was and still is an awesome game played on ibm pc compatibles.
Popularity was basically nothing to do with ports to other os ses or hardware.
Doom is an “MS- DOS game” not a “windows game”.

It had a brilliant shareware (free) version containing 1/3rd of the game - that spread like wildfire.
It had great multiplayer network deathmatch and coop modes.
It maybe gained a bit of notoriety by some morons (who probably didn’t know what a BBS or shareware was) calling it to be banned as a “video Game Nasty” - but it’d have been insanely popular without that because of how many light years ahead it was the previous gen - say wolfenstein or catacomb abyss in basically every way.

It also grew a network of BBS communities who shared user created WADs with levels and mods and stuff extending the game’s content and longevity - and creating a subculture of doom-obsessed tech geeks. Competitive home gamer “speedrunning” and stuff became possible at home as you could basically “record” and share a level on BBS and people could effectively validate each key-press to check for cheating.

It’s true that it was ported to mac and linux and a few other OS fairly soon after release, but the vast majority of home gamers would have been on MS-DOS. Probably there were a bunch of workplace deathmatches on networks of solaris terminals or something like that - but if you had a pc at home, you were playing DOOM on MS-DOS.

Back in 1993/1994 and for years after linux was just nowhere near MS-DOS in popularity, stability, usability, compatibility etc. Debian was literally only just born the same year - but if you think Arch or GEntoo is hard to get up and running . . . that’s peanuts to what a 1993 era linux user would be doing. In fact “linux programmer” is likely what you were - I don’t believe there was such a thing as “linux user” until a years later - and it was still very painful and unstable.

Back then MS-DOS with it’s CLI was stable, simple and fairly efficient - massively more so than the “windows GUIs” that would follow.
DOS was fairly cheap - and there were “other” ways to get it anyway - I don’t think MS cared about home user piracy much - they just wanted B2B deals (and pre-installs with pc sellers).

“Windows” was just not relevant for gaming in 1993 - even in win’95 and win’98 days windows was not really an “operating system”.
windows 3.x/95/98 was just a program that you could choose to run after booting into MS-DOS - and you’d only start up that mess if you wanted the GUI or some wizzywig programs like desktop publishers or something - of course Mackintosh was still the no1 choice for most pro GUI stuff.

Even when windows 1995/98 and so on came out for most gaming I’d have been booting into DOS anyway. everyone had a few DOS 6.2 boot disks lying around. Going into the naked DOS CLI meant you could access the large contiguous chunks of extended memory that games typically needed - starting windows always RAMmed you somewhere uncomfortable.

It wasn’t really until 3d graphics drivers became packaged into directX that that Windows became a real thing for gaming.
From memory something like Grand Theft Auto (1) in about 1997 would have been the first game I would have actually started windows for.

Doom was basically 4 years old and pretty ancient by then. But it was still the number 1 multiplayer game in my house - since by that time we had a couple of PCs capable of Doom plus maybe a laptop or one brought over from a firends. . . . and a bloody unreliable BNC-coaxial bus network. Couldn’t get enough PCs that could run quake well enough to be a fair fight.

However I could imagine a lot of people wanting to get up to four networked devices going to death match at home. SO that may well have been a driver for porting.

I didn’t install it on weird devices like sony ericsson P800 or my ipod until much later - for example not until those devices were invented and cheap enough.
And all that was just a gimmick -or geeks fucking around “because they can” - the control interface of P800 touchscreen was just nowhere near the proper keyboard experience. If you can’t simultaneously sidestep+sprint+turn and run backwards - you can’t play doom.
DOOM on a ipod click-wheel - just fucking stupid - surprisingly slightly better than the P800 though.

haha.
Similar, I skim then, don’t really know what they exactly mean, but often some terms and phrases are just scary.

Is there any youtube channel or something where someone knowledgeable goes through them and points out what the different parts mean.
I think that’d be quite interesting or at least useful.

explainingcomputers on youtube.

But really he just shows how there’s nothing to it these days.
Probably easier than a windows install.
Especially if you try to force your brain to read the windows user agreement - I tried to do a micrsoft virtual machine install recently, and got stuck at the EUA. My mouse just refused to click yes.

I think your argument works if someone is stealing the beef.

If they are buying it then that is directly funding that “90%”.

the best part is no part.

edit - deleting my comment
, i didnt notice which forum.
actual answer is: showerthoughts or something?

oh i was just making a stupid joke about 2KB.
I didn’t realise there was an actual other y2k problem.

How did they get to a 32 bit problem within only 2038 years?
Oh is it like 32 bit counter of seconds or some dumb shit like that.
Stupid shortcut data structures.
That said I’d better check the RTC module in my arduino alarm clock.
It’s a clock module though so i assume it was designed by someone who gives time enough respect to store the data properly.

Year 2030 will not start before year 2029 has ended.
I think it’s not til year 2048 that we get the actual Y2K bug at which point I’m a bit less sure.

Yes, I can live without youtube I survived the 1980s and 1990s - I’m not saying my life is or was “meaningful” though - that’ll be discernable if the maggots enjoy their dinner whenever the time comes.

I also think there were at least a few generations of humans before that, some of whom may think they led at least slightly meaningful lives.

I don’t think youtube makes anyone’s life more or less “meaningful”, it’s just a way to pass the time - but that’s just my opinion on carbon-shuffling in general. If you accept peoples own objectives instead of mine, then youtube might help them learn stuff - but even then I’d look to measure the content of their consequent actions, much more than learning in abstract. They’ve still got to put their new knowledge together with skills , practice and the real world circumstances to before anyting “meaningful” happens - and that’s due as much to their hard work as much as to their teacher.

But I do prefer to watch a few people’s videos on there as entertainment, only a few of them post on that p2p thing “lbry” or whatever so i dont use that. I will continue to watch youtube videos given the choice, and not having somethign better to do, until those people move their videos to somewhere else.

I’ve recently been finding out that freetube client removes much of the front end unpleasantness.

Things like freetube seems to be basically a simple yt front-end.

I don’t know what happens if a significant amount of yt users used freetube. but that probably won’t happen.

I find it a lot more pleasant to use than yt.

windows is a pain in my glass

I’d pick any random manatee over a human.
Why? Manatees seem nicer than humans, as far as I can tell.

I don’t know that much about manatees though, given a sniff of power maybe they’d turn into arseholes too; but I think I’d rather someone else had a turn than yet more humans.

It’s a gnarly spelling.
Don’t let it gnaw away at you too badly.

saiorse

There is no distro.

Too right.
Someone needs to make a start on the “periodic table of emulators” It might as well be OP.

waydroid is pretty easy to get working - and I think will be usable by the actual end user once set up.

I did look at stremio but I couldn’t see a way to do the offline downloads thing on netflix.
That is a desirable feature for the person who travels a lot and they just want to have some videos for when they’re off-line or on limited bandwidth like on the train or bus.

This servarr thing looks way more complex - though I admit I might be a bit too dim for it as I couldn’t figure out what it actually does.
Thanks for the suggestions though - waydroid looks easiest to meet all the needs. I’m sure someone smarter than me will have fun with that weird servarr suggetion - it does seem to have a whole lot of features.