Anybody else here play Oregon Trail on a teletype terminal? The school had 2 terminals in a small basement room that a few of us nerds could get access to for and hour or two a week, We would try to learn Basic, (with no one to teach us), and play Oregon Trail and get yelled at for going through some much thermal paper…

Me too. As a toolmaker and engineer, space mice were a thing. But they were stupidly expensive and still are. I was unwilling to spend the money for one. So I use a ball mouse and I still do for when I need to do serious CAD work these days-- designing my next model steam engine.

They were using it for pig feed.

Order a Slate pickup. Buy what you want and only what you want. And add things later as you want or buy that tablet from amazon and a bluetooth speaker and install it yourself.

I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.

So if you want just that simple radio, not only don’t you get the bluetooth, but you have to give up the power seats and windows too. It’s an all or nothing choice.

There was a time you would order your new car with individual accessories and then a couple of months to get it. I’m pulling for Slate to be successful and bring that freedom of choice back.

To maybe add a little bit of perspective on the why of his hunting a Cape Buffalo.

The danger of getting maimed or killed is an integral part of the hunt for people like him. This time he lost to the hunt and the Buffalo won. And this is not considered the most dangerous land animal in Africa to hunt. That honor goes to Hippos. Evidently they don’t much respect getting shot with .500 nitro Express…

I won’t shed a tear for him, but I do understand his thoughts.

Legislation is a poor way to force populations into changing away from something they choose to do/use. As the saying goes “It’s hard to talk someone out of something they weren’t talked into”.

Example: See France or Somalia

You should spend some time trying to teach CAD to students in High School. My first couple of days with a new class involved teaching them that, No you can’t use your finger, and then how to use a mouse.

All it takes is one big brother/sister that knows how to access a free or paid VPN and their 5 year old little sibling and all their friends will have it also. Despite the difficulty teaching them math or history, they DO learn very quickly and are fast to figure out new things that interest them.

Do you know what’s smarter and more talented the the UK government?

14, 402, 544 kids…

And you don’t think iPhones and Apple don’t know your location?

They got pills for that. Just sayin’

Vivaldi is OK, but I would replace it with something else. It’s a pretty busy UI and I have had issues with it freezing in Fedora 42 KDE.

Gimme mah Cube!

And the wobblies and explosions are cool too!

I remember when Walmart sold boxed releases of RedHat and Mandrake. My first installs were fueled by $20 boxed releases at Walmart. I was so bummed when they stopped. But I could send away for Ubuntu releases on a CD for free.

Thanks to Trump, there appears to be some initiatives in Europe for governments to switch to open source. It seems they want to try and get out of relying on US companies for their technology. That would make a large jump in the user base.

They have tried before, and not had the best luck in dropping US vendors. Things seem to run out of steam at some point and they switch back. It will be interesting to see if things stick more this time.

I’m pulling for them to succeed.

I briefly looked at LFS with the thought to try it a long time ago. No… Just no…

That’s not an OS, that is a psychotic break with reality. Fortunately, you can take shots for it…

I did Gentoo for a bit also. Ain’t enough hours in the day…

Despite not being a gamer myself, Gamers are or should be a hotly contested demographic for Linux to chase and capture. And thanks to Steam, there is a shift happening as gaming gets easier.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.