After a decade

oday I took an old ARM laptop out of the kitchen because its battery is barely sufficient to even complete booting. It can run from the mains, but if the battery is too weak, then it won’t even do that. It’s something dumb about the hardware design.

I think that laptop turns 10 next year.

I checked how to swap batteries on this type of laptop, but it’s complicated, risky, and the batteries aren’t cheap.

Badly designed.

Nothing lasts forever

esterday I rebooted the laptop “bubi” for the first time since December 2023. It was up and running nonstop for nearly 3 years.

When reboots are as rare as this you kind of worry the reboot sequence might not complete due to file system repair needs.

GNU/Linux is thankfully still reliable enough

have just taken a look at 12-month trends in Clownflare. It’s not hard to see how in the past year GNU/Linux steadily gained. Another year or two like this and the international average might show 10% or more for GNU/Linux.

In statCounter it already says 9% or more.

N 2000 when I first began using GNU/Linux as a “desktop” (not just laptop) it ran GNOME, KDE, and all sorts of simpler environments. It was good for development but harder to “use” if something more advanced was required that assumed you were a Windows user. The Web, games, and proprietary Office formats were barriers.

Now, 26 years later, GNU/Linux makes huge gains and the above barriers are mostly a thing is the past.

The progress was gradual; many attacks (FUD and ‘cancel culture’) slowed down this progress.

ITH a bunch of low-cost hardware, some of which as cheap as under $200 (for laptops!) from displays or ‘pre-owned’ (slightly used), I’ve managed to build my workspace over the years. The cost may seem hard to believe; there used to be 4 laptops, but one died a month ago after 11 years (when it was bought by my wife in 2009 it cost more than those 3 laptops combined) and the remaining items — both screens and laptops — cost less than $1000. 3 screens, 3 laptops. The cost of the most expensive laptop — my main workstation — was less than the cost of the chair (224 pounds) and software costs are zero (GNU/Linux is free and all the applications I ever use cost nothing).

“Windows 98 should have been released for free on Jan. 1, 1996 and titled Windows 95.1. If this were Hollywood, then Windows 98 would be the equivalent of ‘Heaven’s Gate’, ‘Waterworld’ and ‘Godzilla’ rolled into one. A huge, overhyped, bloated, embarrassment.”

–Jesse Berst, ZDNet editor

MY GENERATION (I’m 37) grew up on DOS. Not necessarily Microsoft DOS, either. Just DOS. As a kid I used to work from the command line. We, as kids, taught one another new tricks; sometimes an adult would visit to teach us things and copy some programs for us (floppy disks with compressed archives). Various utilities like RAR were useful. Sometimes an infection (malicious program) needed to be removed. That was before the days of Windows 3.x — the days we used ncurses-type interfaces to type documents and send these to printers. Later on I did some programming with batch files and at around age 15 I started with Pascal (quite popular at the time owing to simplicity and relative elegance).

I mostly missed the BBS generation (some friends of mine used it; they’d copy for us files they got from there). When bulletin board systems were still popular many computers did not even have modems (few of my classmates had them, usually because of lack of a technical parent, and only one of them was a GNU/Linux user in the mid/late nineties). I think I got my first modem when I was 14 and IRC was probably the first thing I used “on-line”. After Windows 95, which many people used at that time, I bought my last Windows laptop. Actually, my father bought it. He used it and then passed it to me. It had only 32 MB of RAM and Windows 98. I carried it around and used it in university as an undergraduate student (at the faculty I used GNU/Linux at the time). It retired years later and I’ve not bothered with Windows since then. I wrote a great deal about it in USENET at the time. Memories from these days are mostly gone by now; I barely ever touch Windows and when I do it’s over Remote Desktop, typically to access a client’s network, e.g. to run PuTTY from a remote system. That happens about once a month (patching Debian GNU/Linux servers).

Was Windows 98 a decent operating system? No, it was unreliable, but at least it ran on modest hardware without much RAM. I ran Firefox on it, with a total system capacity of something from the mid-nineties (~400MegaHertZ CPU, 32 MB of RAM). That was before Microsoft added back doors to Windows (this was reportedly done in 1999), before the bloat of NT and before DRM (Vista).

With 3 weeks left before the end of this year (and this decade) I remember not so fondly the 90s, back when I used Windows. In 2000 I moved to GNU/Linux, helped by a Finnish friend, an exchange student at the university. In a sense, next year I become a 20-year GNU/Linux user.

In time for the holiday

Many times in the past I’ve covered and explained the real story, which some companies want you never to know about.