No no, discluded is for when you exclude someone and diss them at the same time.

I think it's one of those flammable/inflammable sort of things.

She was about to say discarded, then change the route mid sentence.

Got 'em!

Annie failed English but they change her grade to get her out of their school

Windows vista. Man that's a memory.

Which country? Similar feeling here. Then when I went to engineering school there were a few linux users. Into the workforce; some linux server stuff, Novell, redhat etc, mostly windows. All desktops windows. Moved away for 8 years, come back and its a lot of Macs, and some Linux workstations. Wild times. I now know quite a few linux users. Some who have macs for work but run linux at home. Or like me have just completely gone linux.

That was definitely back before Apple went crazy with their whole closed ecosystem. Apple II feels a lot more like linux these days considering the amount of documentation available about the hardware. And parts aren't locked down with serial numbers like in the iPhone...

I had a lot of fun as a kid messing with an Apple IIgs. One of the games I had was "Thexder", and you can probably guess where I got my username.

Basically the same here haha

The question really does need to be separated out by era. Are we talking Mac System 7 vs Windows 3.1, Mac OS 9 vs Windows 98, early OS X vs Windows XP, Intel Macs versus Windows 7, ARM Macs vs Windows 10, etc.? Each generation had a different user paradigm, and people who were good with one versus another might mean different things than other generations.

Sadly, the public is vastly undereducated in the value and importance of control variables.

I somewhat managed to set up my own mail server on my PC when I was 14. It was unbelievably shitty, barely functional but I did learn a great deal and only wasted about a week of my life while gaining some trauma. After I realized I can send and receive some e-mails, I immediately reinstalled windows to play counter strike with my friends as I was becoming ostracized for constantly talking about POP3 at school. That was the episode that made me understand that I do not want to do computer science.

You did better than me at 16 lol, I tried an oddball Linux distro on some old hardware, booted into a plaid graphical glitch desktop (which with hindsight I'm pretty sure was a graphics or other driver issue) and gave up. But this was like 2005 and if I could write a letter to my past self I'd probably include the recommendation to try Fedora or Debian instead.

Funny enough, that distro had the RPM package manager and I now daily drive a distro that technically uses that too (Bazzite - if you're using that package manager you probably should have picked something else).

Well, for the EXEs you just needed to use Wine.

About te UI... Well, graphical environments are independent of the distro most of the time, the only exception is when a distro has its own DE or WM hardcoded to it and won't support anything else, as Mint, but even Cinnamon and MATE can be run on other distros

At 12 I was not so interested in the features and mechanics of computers and OSs as to even have an opinion on the Windows UI, let alone consider other options. I was using AOL chat rooms and MSN Messenger, watching stupid flash videos on Newgrounds, and playing The Sims and Mech fighting games. I was in college studying Computer Science before I even gave a shit, and didn't actually install Linux on my PC until I was in my mid 20s. So, from my perspective, you're still an outlier.

I had a job developing software for datacenter machines' hardware and software health. And the most common automatic repair that we had was escalating 1. reboot; 2. reinstall OS; 3. check hardware. I know it's different but it was fun to see it "first-hand".

And also, "to create Linux problems, be root" works as well.

Hey, if it’s an Intel Mac they run Linux great. I’m using a 2011 iMac running Linux Mint going on two and half years and haven’t had any issues!

(I know that more recent Macs have Asahi Linux, but I’ve not used it and cannot speak to it)

Macs can actually be really good linux computers. It's not always straightforward, but I've heard good things once it's installed.

Tbf rebooting fixes Linux problems too, though usually after paru -Syu.

On my family's 386, it booted into DOS, which I wasn't literate enough to figure out at the time, but I knew how to load MS DOS Shell, which was a text-based file GUI I could navigate to launch DOS programs, or I could run Windows 3.1 to play Castle of the Winds. (And I was aware Windows has other purely theoretical uses. It was only necessary for Castle of the Winds.)

I remember when my aunt got us a 320MB hard drive loaded with shareware games. That was life changing.

I was once humiliated in a room full of IT peers because a colleague stuck his Apple laptop in front of me and I'd never used an Apple touchpad before that meeting. Two-finger swiping was such an alien concept I never would have guessed that's what I needed to do.

Also consider that Apple mice at the time only had one button, so that would exclude using two anything on any Apple pointer controller, right? Nope.

Dang, you're old old

The fact that you're responding to a joke in a very literal way is honestly pretty good.

I did my first programming on a mainframe with punch cards, then migrated to a TI-59. At some point I was typing little games into my friend's VIC-20, and then I got to take my first real programming class in 9th grade using an Apple IIe. I'm not autistic at all, just nerdy as fuck.

I still have the TI-59, buried in a box somewhere.

Apple users are dumb. Or some other bs