I started 28 years ago with Slackware 3.0, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, took a detour via OS X, then back to Ubuntu, now Arch.

Slackware in 1997.

I ran it on a 486SX/40 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB harddrive.

It turned me into the man I am today.

My first experience was with two floppy images I found on “So much shareware! Vol.2”.

It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.

A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn’t fry your CRT.

Good times.

Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.

We spent a lot of time on IRC.

MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.

I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.

“Let’s wait and C”.

They are offering a free battery swap if you are affected. Or $50. Or $100 off a new phone.

Sounds like they’re picking the cheap route out of a full recall on a pretty old phone.

Maybe I can submit a proposal for risc-VI 🤣

No need! You can make your own custom extension! If the silicon doesn’t support it, then you can provide firmware to emulate it.

I’m no connoisseur, but I just want the same feel as I had back in the 90s. No terminal emulator, straight up tty with crisp VGA ROM fonts at some hacky SuperVGA resolution. Before the virtual framebuffer that basically every computer today uses for tty.

Konsole, gnome-terminal and ghostty can all be made to feel right to me. I’m giving ghostty a spin, and I like how it supports custom shaders so I can make it feel even more like home.

Sure, it performed “fine”.

But it was sluggish compared to the VGA ttys we were used to.

Now, if we can have something as snappy and at the same time as pretty as Eterm… 👌

Is it really practical in 2024? I used pine as my sole e-mail client for many years.

In the last 15 years it feels like every mail expects the client to be able to render html, with no real fallback for text-only. Even when my client only blocks remote images some mail can be quite hard to decipher.

Company handbook even requires me to have a html signature with a picture of the company logo… before that I’ve militantly only sent text-only e-mail.

I haven’t used one as a tty, but my father had a typewriter like that.

He’d feed in forms for invoicing and software would have the typewriter fill in values in the right fields of that form.

I’ve had vt220/320/520 terminals back in the day. Been itching to source one now that I have a forever home to store crap like that, but they’re becoming quite rare and expensive.

Might’ve been a while since you tried. There’s quite a few options now. zstd is real nice and fast.

Envycontrol is simple and works well.

I much enjoyed it back in the day. Nokia even had their own app store for it and gave a nice financial incentive for the first hundred or thousand apps.

I feel Jolla & SailfishOS is the spiritual successor.

I use a PowerBook G4 running MorphOS.

My parents never bought me an Amiga when I was little, and I’ve been making up for it ever since.

Integrated GPU is not a dirty word anymore.

AMD’s system-on-a-chips with RDNA2/3 pack almost the same punch as the discrete cards with the same architecture. See steamdeck as the prime example, but there’s quite a few boards, boxes and laptops with the same.

My desktop, laptop and homelab all synd my important stuff over syncthing. They all do btrfs snapshots three months back in case an oopsie would propagate.

The homelab additionally fetches deduplicated snapshots of my VPS weekly, before syncing all of the above to an encrypted hetzner storage for those burning-down-the-house events.

GalliumOS is x86/64 only, and has been deprecated for years. Mainline distros have good support for the Chromebook quirks now.

Cadmium, on the other hand.

INFO: What filesystem does your source drive/partition have?

For an external display I’d bet the case is the hardware driver for the panel.

At least my 17" Powerbook G4 with a massive 2560x1440 display does it in the software display driver. I’m sure some laptop panels do it in hardware as well, but seems there’s some very janky shit going on at least with laptops that have both integrated and discrete GPUs.

My PowerBook G4 might be a bit dated, but running other resolutions than native is quite heavy on that thing. Your built-in display can handle one resolution only - anything else will require upscaling.

Your GPU can probably do that upscaling for cheap. But cheaper than rendering your desktop applications? 🤷‍♂️

You’ll have to benchmark your particular device with powertop.