Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...

Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...

Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...

Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...

Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...

Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...

Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!

Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!

Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(

Talk about your highs and your lows.

Here it is: get MythTV up and running.

In one corner, building from source, the granddaddy Debian!

In the other, prebuilt and ready to download, the meek but feisty Xubuntu!

Debian gets an early start, knowing that compiling on a single core VM won't break any records, and sends the compiler to work with a deft make command!

Xubuntu, relying on its user friendly nature, gets up and running quickly and starts the download. This is where the high-bandwidth internet really works in her favor!

Debian is still compiling as Xubuntu zooms past, and is ready to run!

MythTV backend setup leads her down a few dark alleys, such as asking where to put directories and then not making them, but she comes out fine!

Oh no! After choosing a country and language the frontend commit suicide with no error message! A huge blow to Xubuntu as this will take hours to diagnose!

Meanwhile, Debian sits in his corner, quietly chugging away on millions of lines of C++...

Xubuntu looks lost... And Debian is finished compiling! He's ready to install!

Who will win? Stay tuned to find out!

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

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AAAAAAAAAAARRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm gonna break this laptop in half if I will not get a break from Windows!

I'm running it in a VM and STILL this fucker gets on my nerves SO FUCKING HARD!!!

1. CPU% 100%. Laptop fans are spinning so hard it's ready to take off
2. My hands are on the laptop. THey are HOT from the heat from inside. Hell that's uncomfortable!
3. ctrl+shift+esc to see why is cpu% 100%. It's something called WMI Host something. Kill that mthrfckr!
4. Process respawns immediately and goes up to 100% again. I have already increased handles limitation for that service a few weeks ago. Like 20x more than it was before!
5. website in IE
6. does not seem to be responding
7. hit f5. Nothing happens
8. Hit refrech buttong on the toolbar. Nothing happens
9. Place cursor at the address bar and hit ENTER. Nothing happens.

Meanwhile my hands are burning.
WHAT THE FUCK!!!

What kind of idiotic system is that!! My asshole is a better OS than this piece of SHIT!

AAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH#@ŦŊæ¶đ@#ĸogęq j

I'm super pissed. Better keep a 30-40 meters distance from me so the things I throw at you would not hit your ballz!

Now that I come to think of it, the only times I am THAT pissed is the times I am using windows. Srsly.

So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.

I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.

I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.

Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.

Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.

I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."

He puts the phone down.

So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.

I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?

Any ideas would be appreciated. <3

I wanted to watch a movie with a far away friend. Stayed away from screensharing and used rabb.it (they spawn firefox in a container/vm and stream it to viewers). The movie i wanted wasn't in the list, so i navigated firefox to youtube. The video was blocked whereever firefox runs -.-
Got creative, pasted the youtube-link onto a download-site and opened the download-video-link in firefox. Firefox attempted to open the video -.-
I tried to create a minimal webpage with the video in about:blank and the devtools-console. Firefox was configured for american keyboard layout, in the end i had to copy-paste everything with non-alphanum-characters in it.
Shortly after the youtube-video was loaded and ready to be watched, i felt like god if he ever were to use a pc. Then i got the message "my roommates made me go out with them tonight" -.- With the knowledge that both of us wont spend the evening as planned all my accomplishments seemed to perish.

It's my yearly cleanup day, when I fully nuke down my windows installation, to clean out all the installed trash and residue.

Have moved all important data and I will be ready to fully refresh my computer as soon as it syncs, heres the question though.

I decided this time I'll create a dev vm, so I can just each time reset to point 0 and also because I miss having local development.

What new linux distros or flavours are out there that would be worth looking at? (I saw things like ubuntu budgie being mentioned)

If you use it and it doesnt break if I sneeze, mention it, I am open to getting to know other environments, even if its not my usual debian homeplace.

This 3 day weekend couldn’t come at a better time! Today has done everything it can to delay it and everything has been a superb annoyance!

It started off with our internal systems going down, a frustratingly tedious project proposal process, our phones went down, off the wall calls to support all day causing them to ask me junk.

As a parting gift the pending windows update and it completely crashed my development VM and corrupted my install of virtual box. I had planed in only working a half day, but worked 6.5 hours, hit traffic al over. Was late to the event.

Not I get here and there’s a bunch of smokers outside and I could reallllllly use a drag. But I’m not gonna. 😒

Just ready to kick back and do non computer things til Tuesday. 😎

CTO at my previous company think that wordpress based website is took a long time to load.
I suggest to use caching and fix ton of abusive query, He refused. He spun up more VM, upgrade the ec2 instance level to the max. Said that he resolved the problem. But the problem still persist actually.
Blame me for slow response website, blame me for late of deployment because data is not ready ( there's a lot of spam in there, we need to clean it before )
I left the company, Coworker said that he just install a bunch of caching plugin,
He made the website down for entire day and don't understand what is happening. Ask other developer to fix it quickly, to do unpaid overime
The site is back to bussiness, said to all team that he already fixed it.
Everything good happened, he claimed that it was his idea.

And the best part is : he put 'ssh' as skill list in his personal site

College broke my school VM by "accidentally" pushing a policy to just me that disables being able to start anything after logging in (no DWM or Explorer, either, so just login, then infinite abyss.) Fine, nothing I can't fix, i got around shit like this in middle school. Reboot... can't get to the school's webpage. No DNS...?

No.

Windows disabled all the network services. Why? Defender didn't start, is why. Why not? School broke it. Goddammit. Gotta fix that.

There, are we ready now? NO, OFFICE ATE SHIT. FUCK, LEMME REBOOT AGAIN...

How about now? Everything works? Cool, let's get some work done. Download assignment, and... file's busted. Redownload? Nope. One more try? Nothing.

I am going to flip my shit I swear to fuck

!rant
Although I wouldn't change my main os (os x), I'd like to have a linux VM ready on my machine.
Which distro would you guys recommend?
To give you a quick description of how advanced I am with operating systems, I have used windows for the majority of my life (I'm 19), have recently switched to osx (when the new mbp came out) and have spent about 3-4 months using only ubuntu in between my windows/osx switch. Besides that, I've only done some minor projects with a raspberry pi.

It's time to make them work...

Today I was going to wipe an server used for testing purposes, I thought that all vms are just tests that has been left over from restored backups.

Was in the raid controller configuration ready to format the drives an couple of menu navigation away, a colleague came looking for me and said an website was not working, strange...

Turns out that one VM responsible for hosting our internal websites was on that machine