There was a time…I was there. (Insert flashback scenes) But that time has long passed.

Distros have become easy enough that one doesn’t need to interact with the CLI if you don’t want to. I’m running Fedora Kinonite right now. I don’t even need to worry about installing updates. I checked a box or two and it does it all without my attention. And then applies the updates on the next reboot. But, you can open a terminal anytime or anywhere and have at it as much as you like. Linux is whatever you want to make it. And that’s pretty cool.

Do you really want someone like the magahats having control over something like that?

While I do agree that the Windows upgrade circle is vicious and manufacturers benefit from it every time they sell a new machine. It’s not the whole problem Linux needs to over come.

There is an incredibly large amount of sheer inertia that needs to be overcome. And that’s a lot harder to to break than the upgrade cycle because users don’t like change. It’s like a huge boulder rolling down a mountain. And while you can see little pieces of it chip off now and then. It’s due to the sheer size of that boulder that it ain’t stopping anytime soon.

It’s going to a lot longer before the “Year of Linux” ever happens.

That brings back memories. I had an eeePC back in the day also! A fine little portable machine in it’s time. But yes, time passed it by. I’ve got 2 old 16" laptops sitting on a shelf that no longer power on at all. And 2 old Chrome books that still light up. I should really do something with those I suppose.

My current fascination is mini desktops. I have an N100 mini with 8gigs of shared memory. It came with Win10 on it but that only lasted until I wiped it and did a bit distro surfing before settling on Fedora 41 Cinnamon. As a student/lite office machine that only cost me $90US from amazon, (I had an unused HDMI monitor), it’s amazingly sturdy to use. I want a bit better one now…

I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.

I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.

So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.

No, a programmer’s reason for existence is to bring me the butter…