Reddit refugee

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • What kinda question is that? Seems pretty judgemental to me.

    Some people are “the computer guy” for a BUNCH of people, and if your usual pocket arrangement allows them there are a bunch of tools you can use for different jobs.

    It’s just a different kind of pocketknife at the end of the day. I don’t interact with nearly enough people to need one, but I can definitely see the possibilities.

    This seems like a question that 90s people would ask. “What are you doing with your life that necessitates carrying a globally-connected supercomputer in your pocket?”

    In different use cases I can see plenty of times where a bootable USB drive can mean you can use your own computer from any other machine. Which is super cool. It’s gonna be a much slower version of it, obviously(because of USB read/write, but pretty cool that you can carry a full copy of your system, settings, documents, and programs than can sync to/from your regular backups. Or another with copies of other boot level tools to have on hand. If you help a bunch of people with covering from microshit to Linux, then keeping a LiveISO on hand for them to try out and install seems like a good idea to keep around.

    There’s just so many reasons why you would ask this. Personally I don’t, but if I did I would like to think I could ask the question.

    If nothing else, it’s interesting to think about for sure. Now I kinda wanna imagine what kind of stuff is even possible to run like this that would be useful to me.

    I only own one such at all, and I’ve only used it a very few times. Once to install my own OS, once to install a different one I leave at my brother’s house because his laptop is having issues and I go over there to watch movies with him, and once to install that same one (Mint in those cases, Pop for mine) on my parent’s computer.

    If I find a good enough use case, I would start carrying at least one. But for now I just rewrite this one for whatever things I need at the time.













  • I remember those old UI elements. I tried it a couple years later (edgy eft) but I just toyed with it in VirtualBox. And my computer at the time wasn’t able to give a virtual machine a whole lot of oomph, so the experience was lackluster.

    But it was a marvel to me to see what a UI really could be other than specifically Windows. I knew conceptually what an OS. I knew that DOS was one (even if it looked totally different), and that Windows was basically just a graphical version of a terminal at the end of the day. I knew Windows was just one example of an OS, but it was still the only reference point I had to what one looked like and how it worked. I never even saw a Mac computer in person til my first year in college when I started seeing MacBooks on campus.

    So I knew of Linux, but if you remember 2004, it was such a primitive time for computer power and operating system design, and setup was much clunkier than the easy installers we have now.

    Ubuntu was the first one I heard of that had an installer similar to Windows that didn’t need a tech manual or crash course in using the CLI to get running.

    I am not a canonical fan or anything, but I didn’t know anything about so that back then, and was just giving it a whirl.

    I didn’t give it a whole lot of time tho, as most of my computer use was for gaming and I didn’t have games for Linux, and proton wasn’t a thing yet. I had just heard of Steam. It wasn’t even a year old yet at the time. Not that any of that mattered since I was running in in a virtual machine anyway, so even if I had gotten the games to work, they would’ve been super underpowered. My AthlonXP system with my Radeon9800pro and 512MB RAM wasn’t gonna have the overhead to run the game that way in a virtual machine less than half the power of that machine. Halo just wouldn’t have been fun.

    Which now that I think about it, that was the first simultaneous online game I ever played. I had messed with pool on Yahoo before, but that’s just turn based. Brand New horizon for me. We only had dial up until the time I got that computer.