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please tell me there is a way to flash a bootable stick on a phone… a windows stick, on ios!
There was on android, but they removed it. Gave me a real headache when I needed to flash a sd card and the only reader was the one on the phone
Ventoy makes it easy. Create a bootable stick/sd once, and you can copy as many .iso files to it as you want. At boot, ventoy lets you select the specific .iso you want to boot.
Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.
I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.
In 2010 it was the smartphone? Not the dozen older computers, misc laptops, or even maybe a tablet lying around?
The sharp zaurus sl5500 with full color and useful in daylight screen was all the way back in 2004 for example.
Or the Asus Eepc in 2007 and it came with Linux!
I would have thought everyone would have access to a cheap fallback computer by then.
Yeah I’m assuming they didn’t have any of those handy if getting a phone was what made it possible
Yeah. It just is really surprising the phone came first that late in computer history
I can’t tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn’t exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.
Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would’ve been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.
I could’ve asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would’ve been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.
And so it’s not that I think it’s weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It’s that I think it’s weird to not understand that not everyone else did.
If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something… anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.
It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn’t you, thats cool.
taking a shot at installing a new OS
To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.
But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90’s and still pretty expensive in the 2000’s. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.
That’s why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.
I think you might be forgetting just how much e-waste was going on leading up to 2010. All the way back in 2003 I was using recycled computers for my Linux servers. Windows XP came out in 2001 and by about 2005 the number of Win98 machines being dumped was pretty high.
So I looked it up using the way back machine. I saw a flyer for my local computer store. You could buy a basic but complete computer NEW for under $200 in 2010. You also could spend thousands of course but you didn’t have to. You could get a netbook new for $150.
So I went to some liquidation and used computer sites and old newspapers in 2010. A dell optiplex p4 at 2.4 ghz complete with 90 days warranty: $60. And it seems used is about $50 to $100 in general. Laptops a slight premium. And those are the ones people tried to get money back from. Lots of them were just FREE. The number of garage sale listings in the newspapers offering free computers is crazy.
And I mention all of that because Linux was how you took an old win 98 machine and turned it into a functioning web host, or email server, or NAS, or whatever back in those days.
And by the way, I think I paid $25 for my sharp zaurus used in 2005. It was so cool to have an internet handheld with color that you could use in full sunlight and ran linux.
Edit: I hope you see this! If you lived in Fayette county (GA) in 2010, you could get a Dell Optiplex GX280 P4 at 2.8 ghz complete computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard for $65, with free shipping. That should tell you something right there.
This has been my experience, yes.
Ctrl shift 2 + links2 still works for me most of the time…
Multiple backup computers. In fact I’m a bit peeved my oldest backup computer broke.
Nah now you just switch to a TTY with a bunch of sick Rust terminal tools, or if its really borked you boot into recovery mode and mount the old filesystem and do magic spells at the filesystem until it works.
You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.
Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody’s installing MacOS anyway.
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won’t work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
That’s partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I’ve had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don’t even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it’s called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn’t booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don’t get me started on the keyrings when you don’t update for a while.
Phew, so I’m not alone? 😂
you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC… then someone replied “wait wouldn’t just running the ‘install VLC’ command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?”
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
deleting all the dependencies of VLC
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.
20 years ago linux didn’t run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn’t run on many laptops – I don’t know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn’t work, and it couldn’t sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can’t remember). It did work though!
even today my lenovo doesn’t sleep >_>
Can’t relate, I do not use Arch.
Comically, my Arch felt easier to maintain than ubuntu.
My second computer broke ;.;
The existing computer can serve as the “second” if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven’t borked the hardware).
Yes, it’s a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it’s all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.
In related news: When did you last make a backup?
It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.
Links2 saved my ass a couple times switching to Linux this last year, still a staple when you prefer reading on a real screen.
My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me…
I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure…Did this one early this year. Luckily I just made a backup of absolutely everything just beforehand.
So I just gave up, nuked everything with a reinstall and I was good to go.
Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it’s a conf file for Xorg… but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn’t, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn’t true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can’t handle and you’re out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.
You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.
Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
Mode=50; RefreshRate= 50 Hz Mode=51; RefreshRate= 59.9999999 Hz Mode=52; RefreshRate= 60.0 Hz DefaultMode=51 FallbackMode=50Thanks Xorg.conf
I remember these tough times. Doing all kinds of shit as a kid and the resolution was just to nuke it all and start anew.
That’s how I learned.
All you need is a bootable usb stick
You’re underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there…
Bricked a laptop by trying to flash Coreboot onto it and forgetting to put my original BIOS in the build…
I had a spare parts laptop and reused the motherboard but still, big oopsies on my part.
Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn’t threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
I always talk nicely to my computers. They’re trying their best, and sometimes I have to accept their best isn’t what I hoped for today.
Yeah, that’s when the threat of violence come in handy.
The
dualitybinary of man
With linux: all you need is a bootable usb stick. With windows: all you need is a bootable usb stick and a free weekend.
To be honest, you need that weekend with Linux too but it’s fun instead of dread, and you get to set it up in a whole new way
And the fix is understandable. The number of times I’ve had to fuck with Windows and never quite understood what I did that made it work, because you couldn’t repeat it twice. Sometimes it was just the number of reboots you needed to do for it to uncross the turd caught sideways and suddenly work fine, until it didn’t…
I don’t know, i haven’t needed to debloat or spend hours finding correct drivers and configuring things so my tablet and dac work and still have to manually start the drivers and restart the dac since its driver crashed every hibernate on windows 11.
On linux only setup i needed to do is security certs ro sftp into my uni ftp server and pop in some data into config folder.
And a second weekend to actually make a working bootable Windows USB.
You can make a bootable windows USB in like 15 minutes using the media creation tool.
Way better than the old days of copying ISOs and muckong about with creating partitions on a thumb drive.
I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.
I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
You’re certainly doing Linux! I’ve only had one bad break, but i had a backup (if you mess with f-stab, save a copy it before you do anything)
I guess I take that back, there was 1 time that I did mess up fstab and had to boot live and fix it. But that wasn’t too bad.
You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn’t ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It’s not 2003 anymore.
