gerdesj

I remember my brother ringing me and telling me that he'd managed to wedge 40MB of RAM into his PC. Yes MB. That was when a 1MB stick costed about £30 a pop. It seemed rather insane at the time. Bear in mind that on DOS/Windows machines at the time, you fiddled with himem.sys and autoexec.bat to wrestle memory regions.

Several years later I got a T shirt from Novell (Cool Solutions) for a pretty decent boot floppy disc image that was able to run with a lot of different network cards and still manage to run "ghost" without falling over.

Much earlier, I upgraded my 80206 PC with 1MB of RAM with an 80207 maths co-processor so I could run AutoCAD on it. Yes it did! The next version required 32MB of RAM, which at the time looked pretty mad to the likes of me.

32GB RAM ... ... modern apps generally will use whatever you have. The OS will disc cache, if nothing else.

Start off with Gentoo to get the hang of the basics. Switch to Arch because compile times and heat burns. Try Linux from Scratch for a laugh, giggle and move on, but with a new found respect for distro maintainers.

What's your use case? If it involves AAA games then that will narrow things a bit but if you simply want a bit of docs n that and, internet browsing and a spot of email and realtime sound and CAD then we'll need a broader chat.

Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint - those would be my starters for 10 in no particular order. Pick yours and your hip angle. I personally run Arch (actually) and Gentoo. I don't recommend them as a dip your toe in the water job 8)

Feel free to dive in, the water is lovely.

How should someone who expresses an opinion - that receives downvotes - request feedback?

Ooh, don't mind if I do. Luckily I happen to have a tame VMware cluster and rather a lot of laptops ("mwaaa, mwaaa, won't run Windows 11") to play with.

One of my employees has actually expressed an interest in Linux as a daily driver, which has only taken 23 years. I'm looking for my corp standard distro and I don't think Gentoo or Arch are going to do the job. I'm leaning towards Fedora at the moment but there's no rush, I only get one chance to bring the kids into the light, despite being the MD 8)

Did anyone really think that making UEFI systems the equivalent of a mini OS was a good idea

UEFI and Secure Boot were pushed forcibly by MS. That's why FAT32 is the ESP filesystem.

If I had to guess, a brief was drafted at MS to improve on BIOS, which is pretty shit, it has to be said. It was probably engineering led and not an embrace, extinguish thing. A budget and dev team and a crack team of lawyers would have been whistled up and given a couple of years to deliver. The other usual suspects (Intel and co) would be strong armed in to take whatever was produced and off we trot. No doubt the best and brightest would have been employed but they only had a couple of years and they were only a few people.

UEFI and its flaws are testament to the sheer arrogance of a huge company that thinks it can put a man on the moon with a Clapham omnibus style budget and approach. Management identify a snag and say "fiat" (let it be). Well it was and is and it has a few problems.

The fundamental problem with UEFI is it was largely designed by one team. The wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI is hilarious in describing it as open. Yes it is open ... per se ... provided you decide that FAT32 (patent encumbered) is a suitable file system for the foundations of an open standard.

I love open, me.

I've been a KDE lover since 2.0 or so. I recall compiling it from a tarball for a laugh and it mostly working, which was quite a surprise. I think I had Slackware installed at the time on my desktop and KDE 1.x on it.

Anyway, 23 or so years later ... I'm looking forward to 6. Things have changed a bit 8)

Me too. I just ran time tree across my home directory a few times. Native console (ie C-A-F3) - 54 seconds, Konsole - eight seconds.

Waveterm is still installing (Arch AUR). The fan has a Gentooesque sound to it as a suspiciously complicated thing gets built. Oh God ... electon ... terminal shaking ... golang ... fans whining ... lap melting ..... the Old Ones are stirring.

The deps for this thing are many. " I watched Firefox builds on Gentoo glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate". OK, its now arrived and my laptop case is making ping noises as it cools.

It takes 10 seconds or so to start up. Look pretty. Accept license agreement (wtf). Now what? Hmm lets try typing in that box. OK. time tree. Go back to Lemmy to type the last two paras of this comment, get bored and uninstall waveterm.

Employer here (UK)! I'm probably not normal being the MD and running Arch (actually) on my gear. I had to switch from Gentoo because I kept on burning myself.

For me, something like the LFCSA is something I respect because it is practical. Back in the day I did something similar (Novell I think). I've also grabbed a VMware ... whatever ... and that was a memory test and a waste of money. Who cares if you can quote the maximums?

When I'm hiring, I want to see application and knowledge and not a plethora of industry "quali-wankery"! You can always search for facts but knowing how to apply them is what I want to see.

Be flexible but do try to develop what sort of direction you want to take. What floats your boat out of dev ops, sysadmin etc?

You could also consider self employment/consultancy. I sort of fell into it 23 years ago ...

I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn't Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!

The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.