this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Complete wiring map of an adult fruit fly brain (www.nih.gov)
submitted 4 days ago by Rooty@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You sound like someone with whom I'd get along well. My Linux origin story isn't terribly dissimilar to your BSD one; I hosted a file server on a Windows server when I went to college. I met another, somewhat older as I went to college early, nerd there and he recommended replacing my Windows server with Linux. I don't recall if he gave me the install disk. I think my first Linux system was Red Hat before they became Enterprise and my friend was right - it worked better than a Windows server. I tried to convert all of my systems to Linux at that point, but I still lived with my parents and they paid for AOL for Internet, which (so far as I could tell at the time) had no Linux compatibility. Also, I gamed a lot and back then there was nothing like proton or even (so far as I knew) WINE.

I had to look up what Tumbleweed was after reading your post. I haven't used any form of SUSE for years and years. I use mostly Fedora for my workstations or CentOS/Alma/Rocky for my servers because I was an RHCE for a while (now expired, I think) and was most comfortable in that ecosystem.

My kid has never touched Windows AFAIK; the only Windows system in my network is my wife's work computer (and one VM I setup while experimenting with something, but that's gone now). The kid has two tablets and a laptop I put Linux on, but they're too young to really care about anything but YouTube on those systems. I'll get 'em yet, though!

What got you on SUSE?

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The story there is fairly simple. Basically:

  1. Ubuntu - got an install disk on campus or from a friend, don't recall; my sound and wifi broke when upgrading major releases, so:
  2. Fedora - it's what my university used in the CS labs, so I figured I'd try it out; release upgrades took forever (>1 hr), so:
  3. Arch - coworker at my internship recommended I try it out, so I gave it a shot and loved it; stayed there for about 5 years
  4. openSUSE Leap - FreeBSD didn't support Docker properly and I didn't trust Arch on a server, so I went looking; holy grail was something stable for servers and rolling for desktop, and Debian Testing (we used Debian stable at work) wasn't quite new enough and Sid scared me, so I tried out Leap on a VPS; Leap worked out well and I actually liked Yast, so I figured I'd try out Leap on my laptop; I liked it, but decided I wanted fresher packages, so:
  5. Tumbleweed - I upgraded to Tumbleweed and didn't have issues for over a year (broke less than Arch), so I converted my desktop Arch install to Tumbleweed, and I've been happy for >5 years now (longest I've been on any distro, I think)

I wanted the same system on my desktop and server, and I really like rolling releases on my desktop. openSUSE was pretty much the only one that actually offered both. They were ballsy enough to officially support btrfs in production, so I figured switching my NAS over to it wouldn't be a terrible idea, especially since I only needed RAID mirror so the write hole on raid 5/6 wouldn't be an issue. The first time an update went south on my desktop (Nvidia, go figure), snapper rollback saved me a bunch of time, and that's what sold me on it. I since replaced my GPU w/ AMD and I haven't had a single issue w/ updates since, whereas on Arch I'd have 3-4 manual interventions/year unrelated to Nvidia.

And yeah, my kids haven't used my computers for anything other than Steam, YouTube, and some random web games. But they're technically on Linux and have successfully navigated both GNOME (used for a bit before KDE had proper Wayland support) and KDE, so they're more seasoned than some new Linux users.

[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Awesome answer. Thank you for taking the time. I've enjoyed getting to know this part of your story.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah, any time! It sounds like we had a relatively similar entry into *nix. Have a fantastic day. :)