I can hear this picture.

Seems to me you’re on a good path. Keep it up.

Maybe you should read up on stoicism.

Allowing someone else’s action control your actions is a massive waste of time, let alone a great way to attract trouble.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.

It’s not much but it’s honest work.

Inertia is an immensely powerful force.

You can and should use whatever OS fits your use case. Right tool for the job and all that.

What you should not do is post a clickbait video to trigger the penguins into giving you views.

Upvote for you, dear PUSA fan!

How often are you going to be managing ports?

Just use any tool you like, all they do is fiddle with the Kernel’s filter table.

Yep, we’re officially old.

We tend to suppress traumatic memories, like freeing up lower ram with himem.sys and friends to load Novell NetWare network drivers.

Dear God, it’s all coming back to me! 😭

I’m on level 50-ish in Skyrim, and I either have done all the quests I could find or can’t do some quests because of some bug.

Then I can either pile mods on it to make it more interesting (and lose achievements in the process) or start again with a new character.

Either way, it’s still a nice place to burn some hours.

We played Doom on MS DOS. It was hugely popular because it was a breakthrough for PC gaming. So nothing to do with Linux.

Same here. I have a few games from the Fallout series, but it just doesn’t click for me. I keep going back to Skyrim. It is just fun to ride around the landscape, sometimes doing nothing, with a huge ass battleaxe on my back.

Yes, sorry, I always get them mixed up.

Use Audacity. You can even load all the old Winamp skins.

Hang on, that is a single player game? I now auto-discard AAA games up front because most of them are online multiplayer affairs with fancy in-game items to purchase and silly anti-cheat gimmicks that give Linux users a hard time.

I might look into buying this one, then.

Try the Brutal Doom mod if you haven’t already for an added dose of violence and gore. Combine it with mods like Eviternity for huge new maps and enemies. Enjoy!

My first machine was a ZX Spectrum.

I love the 8 bit games I grew up with but I’m not stuck in that timeframe. I appreciate that I can still play all my old games and the new ones.

I just wish I had more time to enjoy them.

Excluding the 8 bit games, the games where I spent more time are: Doom, Half-life, Portal, Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim.

If I had to choose one, it would be Doom. Such a simple game, so much brainless fun, so many great mods.

Same here. I love a good western, so this caught me by surprise as I didn’t check the name of the movie beforehand.

I immediately recognized the name from the “most fucked up movies” lists that litter the web.